FinOps, WebAssembly, and AI: What are you adding to your tech stack in 2024?

As the tech realm hurtles forward into the unknown, we’ve delved into the experiences of tech professionals to understand the tools that shaped their 2023 tech stacks.

They provide a snapshot of the current landscape, and we also venture into their predictions for the forthcoming year, unraveling the threads of emerging trends that promise to redefine technology in 2024.

Paige Cruz, Senior Developer Advocate (Chronosphere)

“My tech stack majorly changed in 2023 since it was my first full year working in technical marketing (having spent the last six-ish years working as a Site Reliability Engineer).

My current company, Chronosphere, builds on top of open source observability standards and projects, so I’ve gotten to know Prometheus and a bit of PromQL, deepened knowledge of OpenTelemetry including the Collector and instrumenting for metrics, use OTelBin all the time to validate Collector configs, leverage Podman containers for building workshops that work across a variety of attendees’ machines, RevealJS powers all my team’s workshop decks and Mastodon for social media.

In my personal life, I use Ghost for my personal blog, Fathom Analytics for blog statistics, NocoDB to organize my vinyl/fragrance/craft inventories, Llama Life to manage my to-dos, ProtonMail for email, Backblaze for backups, Kavita hosted on PikaPods for eBooks/PDFs, GrandPerspective for analyzing and optimizing where to clean up disk space, swipewipe for managing photo collection on mobile.

In 2024, I think we’ll start to see more companies experiment with the metrics interoperability between Prometheus and OpenTelemetry, whether that’s instrumenting metrics with OTel and sending/storing them in Prometheus or sending Prometheus metrics through an OTel Collector and onto a vendor or self-hosted storage solution. 

Another bet is that FinOps, which emerged as a way for companies to understand, manage, and forecast cloud infrastructure costs, will expand to encompass the costs of observability/monitoring.

With the focus on cost-efficiency for 2023 and heading into 2024, this is one area that organizations cannot continue to ignore. I recommend proactively taking a look at the trends for observability spend, ideally broken out by owning team, service, environment, and cardinality to get a sense of where things stand today.”

Meade Kincke, Founder & CEO of Imperfektus

“My 2023 tech stack included Rust, WebAssembly, Kubernetes, Helm, Docker, K3S, Proxmox HA, Zola, Zero Trust Networking.

As for 2024, I think we are going to see further development in WebAssembly, replacing Javascript/Typescript, more inventive things being done with aviation and electric vehicles, and an emphasis on security – both software and physical.

Just as blockchain has been the trend over the past few years, AI is the current trend that will continue to be pushed into anything and everything. Unfortunately, only about 1% of it will be useful. With that being said, that 1% should be very helpful.”

Meade will also be one of a speakers in our Shift Conference in Miami, Florida (April 23, 2024), so if you’re planning to attend – prepare your questions!

Gift Egwuenu, Developer Advocate (Cloudflare)

“My tech stack in 2023 was mostly focused on modern web development and a bit of exploration with AI. I mostly utilize Nuxt for front-end development, benefiting from its server-side rendering capability.
I use Cloudflare Workers as my go-to choice because it helps me leverage and reduces latency and scalability when building out my applications.

Whenever I needed to store assets, I used Cloudflare R2 for object storage, and Tailwind CSS was my go-to choice for UI design because of its utility-first approach.

Of course, I can’t leave out the rise of generative AI in all of this. So, I also spent some time exploring building AI applications using OpenAI API and Workers AI.

A notable addition to my stack was Astro. I started using Astro for building out my front-end demos, which was very efficient with content loading and component-based architecture. I’m already familiar with Nuxt.js, and was invaluable in helping me ship quickly. 

This combination of tooling allowed me to create fast, scalable, and user-friendly web applications.”

On the other hand, in 2024,  I anticipate a steady rise in the use of generative AI, with more large language models becoming a key part of the already existing ones from last year.

The trend is set to drive broader adoption of generative AI across various industries. And I know many businesses will want to adopt AI into their workflow to help enhance customer experiences and improve operational efficiency.  This advancement will transform industrial operations, providing innovative solutions to traditional challenges.

On the front-end framework side, there will be an increase in the adoption of front-end frameworks that are focused on performance and efficiency. Frameworks like Astro and  SolidJS, known for shipping less JavaScript, to likely become more popular. This shift reflects a growing demand for faster and more efficient web applications.”