As you all know, the 2024 survey is live and well underway. I'm excited to share the results with you after it wraps up. In the meantime, I wanted to reflect on last year and make some predictions for 2024.

Infrastructure as Code

Under the IaC category, in July 2023, AWS added loops to CloudFormation, finally ticking a box the community has been asking for since troposphere. I suspect that, in combination with the Terraform licensing changes, it may keep people using CloudFormation for a while longer.

Speaking of which, I debated a lot on whether to separate Terraform and OpenTofu into separate questions. Ultimately, I decided to keep them together, but this may have been a mistake. What are your thoughts?

CI/CD

What surprised me the most about the 2023 CI/CD results was that Jenkins still topped usage at 76%. The retention of GitHub Actions is amazingly high, though, at 99%, so I am expecting to see Jenkins lose the top stop in favor of GitHub Actions.

All of this has nothing to do with AWS, which is telling. Their strategy has been a bit all over the place, and CodeStar is being discontinued in July, so that will be removed from the survey next year.

Serverless

In 2023, SAM and Serverless Framework were neck and neck at 50% usage. AWS SAM, however, had higher retention, so my prediction is that it will pull ahead in 2024. That is unless CDK overtakes both of them, given it had much higher retention (84%) vs AWS SAM's 69%.

AWS Application Composer was brand new when the survey ran last year and had 63% interest, so I'm excited to see how far it has come in a year.

AI/ML

In January 2023, most people hadn't heard of OpenAI. It was mentioned a few times, so I included it in the "Others" results, but boy things have changed in a year. This time, it earned a dedicated spot on the survey and I am expecting it to top the positive/negative split beating out all other AWS AI/ML services.

Also, now that expectations are a lot higher for the category, I suspect the happiness scores will be down for 2024.

Well, there you have it. I'm excited to see how these predictions hold up. If you haven't already, please consider taking the survey and sharing your experiences with the community. I'll be back with the results soon after it closes on February 16th.