2021 in Review: The Year of the Platform
A look back at the defining technology trends of 2021. From the unification of .NET with .NET 6 to the dominance of GitHub Actions and the rise of serverless containers, we review a year defined by the maturation of development platforms.
If 2020 was the year of rapid adaptation to remote work, 2021 was the year of building and solidifying the platforms to support that new reality. It was a year defined less by flashy new paradigms and more by the maturation and consolidation of the powerful tools and platforms that developers rely on every day. From development frameworks to CI/CD and cloud infrastructure, the theme of 2021 was the rise of the unified platform.
.NET 6: A Unified Vision Realized
The most significant event in the .NET world was the release of .NET 6 in November. As a Long-Term Support (LTS) release, it represents a stable and powerful foundation for the future. More importantly, it largely fulfills the promise of a single, unified .NET platform. With .NET 6 and its cross-platform UI framework, .NET MAUI, developers can now build applications for web, cloud, desktop, and mobile using a single set of tools and libraries. The focus on performance, developer productivity with Hot Reload, and simplified syntax with Minimal APIs has made .NET more compelling than ever.
GitHub Actions Dominates CI/CD
GitHub Actions continued its meteoric rise to become the default choice for CI/CD for many projects. By integrating automation directly into the developer's primary workflow, GitHub has created a seamless experience for building, testing, and deploying code. The rich marketplace of community-contributed actions has made it incredibly easy to create powerful pipelines, cementing GitHub's position as not just a place for code, but a complete development platform.
The Rise of Serverless Containers with AWS Fargate
The container ecosystem continued to mature, but the conversation shifted. While Kubernetes remains the standard for large-scale orchestration, a simpler pattern has gained massive traction: serverless containers. AWS Fargate has become the go-to choice for running containerized applications without the operational overhead of managing the underlying server cluster. By providing the perfect middle ground between the flexibility of containers and the simplicity of serverless, Fargate has become a key enabler of modern application deployment on AWS.
Infrastructure as Code Becomes the Standard
2021 was the year that Infrastructure as Code (IaC) went from a best practice to a non-negotiable standard. Tools like Terraform and AWS CDK have become essential skills for cloud engineers. The AWS CDK, in particular, has gained significant popularity by allowing developers to define their infrastructure using familiar programming languages, bridging the gap between application code and infrastructure code.
The Python Ecosystem Modernizes
The Python world saw continued modernization with the release of Python 3.10, which brought the highly anticipated structural pattern matching (match/case) feature. Beyond the language itself, the tooling ecosystem has solidified around modern standards. Tools like Poetry for dependency management, Black for code formatting, and Mypy for static type checking have become the default choices for professional Python development.
Looking Ahead
2021 was a year of building and refining. The platforms that we will build on for the next several years have been solidified. As we look to 2022, we can expect to see developers leveraging these powerful, unified platforms to build applications faster and more reliably than ever before, with a continued focus on developer experience and productivity.