In the last few years, a lot of programming languages have been emerging to solve new business requirements, and many of these run on the JVM, which gives a significant advantage to Java developers, making embracing new programming languages less difficult.
It's not a coincidence that new emerging software architectures have been created. Business has expanded around the world, which makes it more challenging to scale old applications. This approach has forced us to rethink how to split business boundaries in order to deliver scalable services to solve business needs. Since we needed to offer services to clients around the world, the cloud appeared, and nowadays we can even select regions to reduce the latency of our applications.
With the cloud ready to be used, the X appeared as a service paradigm. We now have services that are created to deal with specific requirements, such as online payments, authentication, data storage, and so on. This leads us to the creation of serverless architectures; with these, companies are focusing more on their businesses requirements rather than on details that were solved by other companies and are offered as ready-to-consume services.
Having clients around the world means that there is more data to store, and improved data storage is replacing old relational models. NoSQL was forced to be conceived, and recommended techniques such as normalization have been replaced with these models, making practices and recommendations that were previously good entirely useless now. This movement even forced the creation of new careers around it. We are currently studying this data and making it worthwhile. Data scientists are becoming popular today, and their role is to identify what other business opportunities are hidden behind the data, as well as what actions IT people need to take based on this.
Allowing customers to consume services quickly is the functionality that companies are looking for, and conversational interfaces are guiding us to the right path. Devices that contain software to allow people to establish conversations using their voice (such as Alexa, Cortana, and Siri, among others) are offering new possibilities to consume services easier and faster. SDK tools are currently available for developers in many programming languages, since polyglot developers are the most common nowadays.
Not all businesses need to embrace these new trends. However, these new options are introducing companies to a world of opportunities that will provide them with an advantage over those that are not embracing them.