Key Software Architecture Technologies, Trends and Innovations

AI technologies, such as advanced model-building capabilities or generative AI services, can enhance the ability of developers to build next-generation applications.

Evolving product and platform team structures and a team mindset can increase the ability to build and deliver resilient software at scale.

Gartner expects that by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.

Platforms provide a curated set of tools, services and knowledge selected by subject matter experts and packaged for easy consumption by users, usually within an internal developer portal. The goal is a frictionless, self-service, easy-to-use experience that offers the right capabilities to enable the product teams to do valuable work with as little overhead as possible.

Modernizing an application architecture involves selecting the right software architecture, then the right approach for software engineering teams to adopt that architecture.

Software engineering teams are most effective — and deliver most value — when using modern platforms, architectures, tools and practices. Developer retention also improves when engineers use modern languages, frameworks, architectures and tools. Compelling innovations include cloud-native architecture, serverless platforms, low-code platforms, design systems, AI-augmented tools and platform engineering.

Despite the incentive to modernize platforms, languages and tools, software engineering leaders face three key challenges:

• The danger of cost overruns from incorrect use of cloud-native services
• The lack of skills and experience in emergent languages and frameworks
• Comfort levels teams have with their current ways of working, which may have included relying on other teams for things they now need to handle — such as the “run” in “you build it, you run it” teams 

To work through these challenges, software engineering leaders must provide the on-demand training their engineers require to learn how to use new technologies and architectures, and equip teams to experiment and develop best practices that avoid cost overruns or other issues.

Migrating to modern software platforms involves teams and architects assessing options, evaluating the costs and benefits, and then choosing an approach for migration, if required. In larger organizations, software engineering leaders often find they need to establish governance around this process to protect the firm’s interests, without quashing team creativity and originality.

Modern software platforms, including public cloud, containers and serverless, offer new and expanded capabilities such as support for multiexperience and AI-augmented decision making. These deliver greater resilience, scalability, security and automation. But software engineering leaders should not move to new platforms and technologies just for the sake of it; they must work closely with business stakeholders and product management to assess where such changes are important to support critical new business capabilities prioritized for investment.

No single platform, programming language or framework will be right for every application, but software engineering leaders increasingly favor technologies such as:

• Cloud native
• WebAssembly
• Application platform as a service 
• Container management platforms
• Low-code application platforms

Modern software architectures (such as microservices) and the technologies used to deliver them (such as cloud, containers, edge compute and open-source tools) drive up complexity. As a result, software engineering leaders must learn where to apply these architectures versus where a simpler approach is better, and then invest accordingly to enable teams to adopt those favored patterns.

Software engineering leaders are increasingly exploring platform engineering practices to improve the aspects of the developer experience that are negatively affected by high-friction development tools, technologies and processes.

Platform engineering requires a disciplined approach and guiding principles designed to suit the business case and needs of stakeholders, such as whether the platform will be based on open-source software (OSS) technologies and frameworks — which are built by developers, for developers.

Understanding the benefits and risks of OSS, and creating a well-defined OSS strategy, are key to achieving sustainable success. This may include ensuring that software composition analysis (SCA) tools are employed in the software development process. SCA tools can:

• Identify OSS licenses
• Build a software bill of materials of all OSS components in your software engineering environment
• Identify nested dependencies in software

Shifting to OSS means a shift in tools, techniques and structure, and this needs the development of change leadership in the organization. This can begin with the formation of a team that will pilot solutions and practices and that can act as a support and leadership team. Many organizations create an Open Source Program Office for this purpose.