Log4Shell happened at the worst time and the best time. It exposed the gap between teams with dependency scanning and those without. Cloud adoption continued its steady march. And .NET 6 shipped on schedule, solidifying Microsoft's new product discipline. As 2022 starts, the landscape is clear enough to make some solid bets about where the year is heading. Here's what I'm watching.
Cloud maturity past the hype
Cloud adoption is no longer a differentiator: it is table stakes. The organisations that are still on-premises in 2022 are the ones with specific regulatory or data sovereignty constraints, not the ones that have not got around to it yet. The cloud discussion in 2022 is about cost efficiency, governance at scale, and the operational patterns that make large cloud deployments reliable. The infrastructure conversation has moved up the stack.
Generative AI in developer tooling
GitHub Copilot was in technical preview in 2021. The signal from the preview is that developers find AI-assisted code completion genuinely useful for routine coding tasks. 2022 will bring the GA release of Copilot and the first wave of AI-integrated developer tools. The category that is in technical preview in 2022 will be standard equipment in 2024.
Platform engineering formalisation
The DORA report and the Team Topologies framework gave language to what high-performing organisations were already doing: treating internal developer platforms as products. 2022 will see the term 'platform engineering' enter the job description vocabulary, the establishment of dedicated platform teams at medium-to-large organisations, and the tooling ecosystem (Backstage, Crossplane, Argo CD) maturing to support the function.
Security as code
The Log4Shell incident highlighted the gap between organisations with automated dependency scanning and vulnerability management and those without. 2022 will see security shift-left practices accelerate: SAST in CI/CD, SBOM generation, container image scanning, and infrastructure-as-code policy validation moving from best practice to baseline expectation for software delivery pipelines.