2023 Cloud‑Native Trends and Predictions: Cloud IDEs, FinOps, SBOM, GitOps, OpenTelemetry, WebAssembly and More

Author: Chris Aniszczyk (also posted on LinkedIn ).

I hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! The CNCF recently released its annual report covering all the work we completed last year. I recommend reading it carefully because it documents the impressive achievements of the community. Apologies for the delay in publishing my annual predictions; I hope you enjoy this year’s list.

Cloud‑Native IDEs Become the Norm

GitHub Codespaces has completed its testing phase, and while public usage data from GitHub is limited, there is a lot of positive buzz on Twitter. GitPod, together with other companies in the space, has also completed a first round of financing.

I am convinced that short‑lived development workspaces and the time developers save setting them up will drive this technology to become an industry standard. Companies such as Uber, Shopify, Slack, and Stripe already use this model, and as Codespaces and Gitpod become commonplace, these best practices will spread throughout the industry.

Gitpod has compiled an excellent set of Cloud Development Environment (CDE) principles; I recommend checking them out. Redmonk’s analysts share the same view and have published a great article titled “The Year of the Cloud Development Environment.”

FinOps Becomes Mainstream and Shifts Left

Several years ago the Linux Foundation helped establish the FinOps Foundation to foster innovation in this area. The foundation has made a strong start, from hosting the first FinOpsX conference to launching the FinOps State of the Union survey and producing a variety of introductory materials.

This year is crucial for FinOps because cloud spend has risen dramatically and is becoming a major cost center, sometimes comparable to payroll.

FinOps employment trends can also be correlated with Google Trends, providing indicators that economic growth may be reaching a turning point.

Market pressure is driving more standardised and open‑source options such as OpenCost. Traditionally, cracking cloud bills has been difficult, and multi‑cloud environments make it even harder due to the lack of an open standard covering all major clouds.

These pressures, combined with a global economic slowdown, will push most organisations to adopt FinOps practices, not just high‑tech firms. FinOps will become a larger engineering problem, moving from a cost‑optimisation function to a core part of pull‑request infrastructure.

Cost‑management and FinOps will become default components of observability solutions (e.g., Datadog’s new cost‑management product). I expect many integrations and acquisitions in this space.

Open‑Source SBOMs Everywhere

In recent years the U.S. government has issued policies and laws to improve software security, from the 2021 executive order to the recent “U.S. Protect Open‑Source Software Act.” OpenSSF provides a good summary of the law and a mobilisation plan for addressing open‑source security.

Most recently, legislation now requires medical‑device manufacturers to produce SBOMs.

This trend will continue and affect open‑source projects; leading projects like Kubernetes already generate consumable SBOMs. While there may be bumps along the way, regulation or market maturity will make SBOMs inevitable.

New open‑source innovations and startups are aggregating large amounts of this security data (see https://deps.dev as a simple example). Projects I follow include GUAC, Scorecard, Sigstore, Witness, and others.

GreenOps Merges into FinOps

Sustainability is a hot topic, and everyone knows the carbon footprint of cloud‑based workloads is complex. A recent PwC study found that 60 % of Fortune 1000 leaders are using or planning to use cloud to enhance ESG reporting, and 59 % are using or planning to use cloud to improve ESG strategy.

As we improve cloud efficiency, a Jevons‑paradox‑like situation may arise. Research also shows that the future global fleet of autonomous vehicles could emit as much greenhouse gas as today’s data‑centres.

In my view, GreenOps is a FinOps variant focused on cloud‑workload carbon footprints. I hope the community merges these efforts and collaborates on open standards, such as extending OpenCost to include cross‑cloud carbon‑footprint data.

GitOps Matures and Enters Production Peak

Since Alexis Richardson coined the term GitOps in 2017, the ecosystem has changed dramatically. In CNCF, the Argo and Flux projects have recently graduated, demonstrating stability, mature governance, and rapid adoption. They are also among the fastest‑moving open‑source projects in the CNCF ecosystem.

If you are interested, I recommend joining the CNCF Open GitOps Working Group.

OpenTelemetry Becomes More Mature

According to the latest CNCF project‑velocity data, OpenTelemetry ranks second only to Kubernetes, which is remarkable for such a young project.

In recent years almost every major modern observability vendor has integrated OTel. The OTel collector framework frees vendors from implementing this functionality themselves and improves the end‑user experience. In 2023 you will see many advanced‑technology companies adopting OTel, as well as traditional enterprises.

Backstage Developer Portal Maturity

Developer experience is a concern for organisations that have reached a scale where engineering throughput matters. As more organisations start their cloud‑native journey, this becomes critical across industries. In my previous prediction I mentioned that a “service catalog” will become a necessity and more.

In the CNCF community, Backstage is one of the few projects deployed in traditional enterprises even before Kubernetes adoption. It is used by banks, airlines, and cutting‑edge tech companies like Spotify. You can see adoption details in the ADOPTERS.md file and BackstageCon videos.

To move forward, Backstage needs to solidify its API and continue growing its plugin ecosystem, essentially becoming the “Jenkins” of the developer‑portal space.

Gartner has even started researching Backstage and modern developer portals, a sign of maturity.

WebAssembly Innovation and the Enlightenment Slope

I firmly believe WebAssembly (Wasm) will become the dominant form of compute soon, expanding beyond browsers to edge and server workloads. Sapphire Ventures published an excellent article on Wasm’s promise.

From personal experience I see Wasm appearing in more cloud‑native projects, from Envoy plugin rewrites to WasmCloud and WasmEdge. Docker even supports Wasm in its recent technical preview.

However, as use‑cases are discovered and runtimes mature, growing pains will appear. In hype‑cycle terms, Wasm will sit between the “trough of disillusionment” and the “slope of enlightenment.” While many reports are positive, missing support for components like WASI and tail calls remains a reality.

Cloudflare and smaller startups are paving the way for Wasm’s maturity, and large enterprises will likely launch their first Wasm‑related products this year.

Finally, I see a future where containers, Wasm, and even VMs coexist; Docker’s team even says the same.

Cost‑Cutting Benefits Boutique Clouds (or Any “Super‑Cloud”)

Continuing the cost‑management theme, I believe organisations that step back to evaluate their cloud usage will favour boutique cloud providers (or any “super‑cloud”). For example, Cloudflare recently announced a strategic partnership with Palantir focused on cloud‑cost optimisation, comparing its R2 product with S3.

These boutique providers will position themselves as specialists in cost optimisation and customer service, announcing new acquisitions and products to compete with larger clouds.

Kubernetes Reaches Its Linux‑Style Maturity Moment

I can’t talk about cloud‑native predictions without mentioning Kubernetes. Recently I published a piece on the 2022 open‑source project velocity that also uses Kubernetes. Kubernetes now runs in every Chick‑Fil‑A restaurant, on edge devices, on trains, and even in space.

When I say Kubernetes is experiencing a Linux‑style maturity moment, I mean that Linux started as a hobbyist project and later expanded to phones, cars, real‑time systems, etc. Kubernetes is undergoing a similar evolution, with organisations extending it to environments it was not originally designed for, such as embedded devices. These new use‑cases feed innovation back into the project and the broader ecosystem, just as they did for Linux.

Other Predictions

Generative AI will be legislated and cause friction in the open‑source community. Issues around attribution, copyright, and compliance with open‑source policies will spark debate. Lawsuits involving Co‑Pilot, art generation, and Stable Diffusion are already accelerating potential copyright‑law changes. Heather Meeker’s “copyright‑eating AI” blog post is a great read.

VSCode will continue to grow and dominate the IDE space. Microsoft has done a great job managing the community. StackOverflow surveys and top‑IDE indexes show VSCode becoming the default IDE for almost every mainstream language, including its embedded use in Codespaces and Gitpod.

RISC‑V will mature as an open‑source community and see broad adoption in embedded and mobile. Google recently announced Android will support RISC‑V as a “Tier 1” architecture, meaning we will see RISC‑V in Android soon. Geopolitical factors also favour regional adoption.

Open‑source innovation in the game‑engine industry will accelerate. Most AAA games still use proprietary engines like Unity and Unreal. As a16z noted in 2016, the gaming sector needs more open‑source. Projects such as Bevy, Godot, and O3DE are finally delivering that.

OSPOs will keep growing in industry and government due to regulatory and security concerns. As a co‑founder of the TODO Group, I see OSPOs becoming essential for managing innovation and security risk in the increasingly open‑source‑dependent tech stack. European governments are already moving to regulate OSPOs, and others will follow.

Finally, Happy 2023 and Good Luck!

References are listed below.