In many ways, 2020 feels like a lost year. Remote work and no travel have taken a toll on the best of us. 2020 has been a roller coaster ride for almost all of us, but when it comes to digital transformation and software — things are as eventful as ever. The pandemic has forced a lot of businesses to have an online presence in one way or another. Software development services have never been more important to businesses. This is why it is so important to be in the loop of the current trends taking place in the industry.

Here are some trends that will dominate the software development of 2021:

Serverless Architecture

Image at https://aws.amazon.com/lambda/resources/customer-testimonials/accolade-serverless-architecture/

Serverless computing is the combination of the stateless Function as a Service (FaaS), such as AWS Lambda, and the stateful storage Backend as a Service (BaaS), such as AWS S3.

“In our definition, for a service to be considered serverless, it must scale automatically with no need for explicit provisioning, and be billed based on usage.” — A Berkeley View on Serverless Computing

• Serverless computing is where cloud services are fully managed. It allows you to write code to build applications without the need to manage or maintain the underlying infrastructures, such as servers.

• Serverless computing supports the pay-as-you-go billing method, which allows users to only pay for the resources consumed. Compared with traditional computing platforms, serverless computing allows users to select billing methods based on specific scenarios, which helps them reduce costs.

• Serverless computing is application-oriented, making it different from resource-oriented computing platforms, such as virtual machines and containers.

Looking at the architecture diagram of a typical 100 % serverless application will give you a good idea of how it works.

Multi-Platform Frameworks

Multi-platform development implies that the same code will be capable of running on a variety of different platforms. Multi-platform is becoming increasingly common as you can reuse a lot of the developer’s code and other work. And Jetbrains team is doing a great job with that using Kotlin.

Now your application can use Kotlin/JVM for the backend and Kotlin/JS for the frontend. This has a number of benefits: besides syntax, it also allows us to share our libraries and programming paradigms (such as using coroutines), on both frontend and backend. Using Kotlin throughout the whole stack also makes it possible to write classes and functions that can be used from both the JVM and JS targets of our application. Not only that, you can use KMM (Kotlin Multiplatform Mobile) to create a mobile app that works for both iOS and Android!

So practically, you can create a full-blown application just by using one programming language. One of the apps that have recently started using KMM is Cash App. Here you can read about their experience.

Image at https://kotlinlang.org/docs/multiplatform.html

Low-Code/No-Code Technologies

Low-code development enables enterprises to rapidly build and deploy software applications without the use of a professional programmer. Instead of writing every single line of code for a given application, users of a low-code or no-code platform can build their projects with point-and-click interfaces. In this way, businesses can create websites from predeveloped building blocks, set up data exchange with CRM solutions, add online payments via Stripe, and even gather customer feedback via Google Forms or another provider.

Within the next two years, Gartner predicts, more than half of medium to large enterprises will have adopted low-code application platforms.

Tools such as Salesforce Flow Builder help users create end-to-end digital workflows. The tool also automates processes and flows. The tool features components and services that can be selected and reused by users. The company also has a large, well-supported community of app builders.

The Domination of Native Apps

Sounds counter-intuitive because of the cross-platform fuss and the rise of Flutter, but when it comes to providing a better user experience and more powerful performance, you have to go native. As a result of this, more and more businesses are investing in multiple native apps for iOS and Android to enable them to provide their users with a better experience. Going forward, software developers can expect native app development to dominate software development services.

Having said that, I do feel that Flutter has a very promising future. It has already garnered a lot of momentum and the results are good. You can find an in-depth comparison of Flutter and native apps here. And if you are a developer with native app development experience, it won’t hurt to get your hands on Flutter.

With the ever-increasing dominance of iOS and Android operating systems in the market, it doesn’t seem like an investment in app development will dwindle anytime soon.

AI and ML

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning have been in a hotspot for a long time now — and still, continue to be because of the possible use-cases. To be honest, it has more potential than anything else in the whole world. And we are only starting to explore the possibilities with it. With self-driving cars, we are looking at a future that will have a fleet of driverless cabs. Usage of drones to monitor social distancing during the pandemic. Klarna, one of the biggest unicorns in Europe, utilized AI and ML to personalize the checkout experience for the customers. AI tools and platforms are already in place to help businesses understand the way their customers are adapting to a new reality.

“Our latest AI research shows 86% of businesses currently reaping the benefits of the better customer experience through AI, and 25% of companies with widespread AI adoption expect to see the tech payout in increased revenue during 2021. The pandemic has uncovered the value of AI, lending itself to enhancing tasks related to workforce planning, simulation modeling, and demand projection.”

Rohan Amin, the Chief Information Officer at Chase

This year, the ability to add cutting-edge AI capabilities to projects and business processes will be critical for organizations, particularly if they are looking to make great strides in the industry.

Feel free to reach out to me for any questions or discussions. I am available on Twitter. Just DM me. Thanks for reading.