Data quality isn't just a technical issue: It impacts an organization's compliance, operational efficiency, and customer satisfaction.

A discussion on Generative AI: Join industry experts as they talk about how GenAI has transformed the software development space.

Is 2025 the year of API-first development and democratization? Take our annual survey and tell us how you implement APIs across your org.

GenAI: See the trends surrounding GenAI models, algorithms, implementation, its impacts on code generation, and development as a whole.

DZone Trend Report Library

DZone Trend Reports provide expert thought leadership and survey insights into recent advancements in technology, how adoption of new tools or methodologies has grown over time, the challenges that exist in executing on the promises of these technologies, and what new advancements are on the horizon.

Featured Trend Reports

Q1 2025

Generative AI

The Democratization of Intelligent Systems

AI technology is now more accessible, more intelligent, and easier to use than ever before. Generative AI, in particular, has transformed nearly every industry exponentially, creating a lasting impact driven by its (delivered) promises of cost savings, manual task reduction, and a slew of other benefits that improve overall productivity and efficiency. The applications of GenAI are expansive, and thanks to the democratization of large language models, AI is reaching every industry worldwide.

Q1 2025

Developer Experience

The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering

With tech stacks becoming increasingly diverse and AI and automation continuing to take over everyday tasks and manual workflows, the tech industry at large is experiencing a heightened demand to support engineering teams. As a result, the developer experience is changing faster than organizations can consciously maintain.

Q4 2024

Observability and Performance

The Precipice of Building Highly Performant Software Systems

The dawn of observability across the software ecosystem has fully disrupted standard performance monitoring and management. Enhancing these approaches with sophisticated, data-driven, and automated insights allows your organization to better identify anomalies and incidents across applications and wider systems. While monitoring and standard performance practices are still necessary, they now serve to complement organizations' comprehensive observability strategies.

DZone Trend Report Library

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Q1 2025 Generative AI The Democratization of Intelligent Systems AI technology is now more accessible, more intelligent, and easier to use than ever before. Generative AI, in particular, has transformed nearly every industry exponentially, creating a lasting impact driven by its (delivered) promises of cost savings, manual task reduction, and a slew of other benefits that improve overall productivity and efficiency. The applications of GenAI are expansive, and thanks to the democratization of large language models, AI is reaching every industry worldwide. Our focus for DZone's 2025 Generative AI Trend Report is on the trends surrounding GenAI models, algorithms, and implementation, paying special attention to GenAI's impacts on code generation and software development as a whole. Featured in this report are key findings from our research and thought-provoking content written by everyday practitioners from the DZone Community, with topics including organizations' AI adoption maturity, the role of LLMs, AI-driven intelligent applications, agentic AI, and much more. We hope this report serves as a guide to help readers assess their own organization's AI capabilities and how they can better leverage those in 2025 and beyond.
Q1 2025 Developer Experience The Coalescence of Developer Productivity, Process Satisfaction, and Platform Engineering With tech stacks becoming increasingly diverse and AI and automation continuing to take over everyday tasks and manual workflows, the tech industry at large is experiencing a heightened demand to support engineering teams. As a result, the developer experience is changing faster than organizations can consciously maintain. We can no longer rely on DevOps practices or tooling alone — there is even greater power recognized in improving workflows, investing in infrastructure, and advocating for developers' needs. This nuanced approach brings developer experience to the forefront, where devs can begin to regain control over their software systems, teams, and processes. We are happy to introduce DZone's first-ever Developer Experience Trend Report, which assesses where the developer experience stands today, including team productivity, process satisfaction, infrastructure, and platform engineering. Taking all perspectives, technologies, and methodologies into account, we share our research and industry experts' perspectives on what it means to effectively advocate for developers while simultaneously balancing quality and efficiency. Come along with us as we explore this exciting chapter in developer culture.
Q4 2024 Observability and Performance The Precipice of Building Highly Performant Software Systems The dawn of observability across the software ecosystem has fully disrupted standard performance monitoring and management. Enhancing these approaches with sophisticated, data-driven, and automated insights allows your organization to better identify anomalies and incidents across applications and wider systems. While monitoring and standard performance practices are still necessary, they now serve to complement organizations' comprehensive observability strategies. This year's Observability and Performance Trend Report moves beyond metrics, logs, and traces — we dive into essential topics around full-stack observability, like security considerations, AIOps, the future of hybrid and cloud-native observability, and much more.
Q4 2024 Data Engineering Enriching Data Pipelines, Expanding AI, and Expediting Analytics Over a decade ago, DZone welcomed the arrival of its first ever data-centric publication. Since then, the trends surrounding the data movement have held many titles — big data, data science, advanced analytics, business intelligence, data analytics, and quite a few more. Despite its varying vernacular, the purpose has remained the same: to build intelligent, data-driven systems. The industry has come a long way from organizing unstructured data and driving cultural acceptance to adopting today's modern data pipelines and embracing business intelligence capabilities. This year's Data Engineering Trend Report draws all former terminology, advancements, and discoveries into the larger picture, illustrating where we stand today along our unique, evolving data journeys. Within these pages, readers will find the keys to successfully build a foundation for fast and vast data intelligence across their organization. Our goal is for the contents of this report to help guide individual contributors and businesses alike as they strive for mastery of their data environments.
Q3 2024 Kubernetes in the Enterprise Once Decade-Defining, Now Forging a Future Beyond Containerization In 2014, Kubernetes' first commit was pushed to production. And 10 years later, it is now one of the most prolific open-source systems in the software development space. So what made Kubernetes so deeply entrenched within organizations' systems architectures? Its promise of scale, speed, and delivery, that is — and Kubernetes isn't going anywhere any time soon. DZone's fifth annual Kubernetes in the Enterprise Trend Report dives further into the nuances and evolving requirements for the now 10-year-old platform. Our original research explored topics like architectural evolutions in Kubernetes, emerging cloud security threats, advancements in Kubernetes monitoring and observability, the impact and influence of AI, and more, results from which are featured in the research findings. As we celebrate a decade of Kubernetes, we also look toward ushering in its future, discovering how developers and other Kubernetes practitioners are guiding the industry toward a new era. In the report, you'll find insights like these from several of our community experts; these practitioners guide essential discussions around mitigating the Kubernetes threat landscape, observability lessons learned from running Kubernetes, considerations for effective AI/ML Kubernetes deployments, and much more.
Q3 2024 Enterprise Security Reinforcing Enterprise Application Defense Security is everywhere: Behind every highly performant application, or even detected threat, there is a powerful security system and set of processes implemented. And in the off chance there are NOT such systems in place, that fact will quickly make itself known. We are living in an entirely new world, where bad actors are growing more and more sophisticated the moment we make ourselves "comfortable." So how do you remain hypervigilant in this ever so treacherous environment? DZone's annual Enterprise Security Trend Report has you covered. The research and expert articles explore the fastest emerging techniques and nuances in the security space, diving into key topics like CSPM, full-stack security practices and challenges, SBOMs and DevSecOps for secure software supply chains, threat hunting, secrets management, zero-trust security, and more. It's time to expand your organization's tactics and put any future attackers in their place as you hear from industry leaders and experts on how they are facing these challenges in everyday scenarios — because if there is one thing we know about the cyberspace, any vulnerabilities left to chance will always be exposed.
Q3 2024 Database Systems Modernization for Data-Driven Architectures In 2024, the focus around databases is on their ability to scale and perform in modern data architectures. It's not just centered on distributed, cloud-centric data environments anymore, but rather on databases built and managed in a way that allows them to be used optimally in advanced applications. This modernization of database architectures allows for developers and organizations to be more flexible with their data. With the advancements in automation and the proliferation of artificial intelligence, the way data capabilities and databases are built, managed, and scaled has evolved at an exponential rate. This Trend Report explores database adoption and advancements, including how to leverage time series databases for analytics, why developers should use PostgreSQL, modern, real-time streaming architectures, database automation techniques for DevOps, how to take an AI-focused pivot within database systems practices, and more. The goal of this Trend Report is to equip developers and IT professionals with tried-and-true practices alongside forward-looking industry insights to allow them to modernize and future-proof their database architectures.
Q2 2024 Low-Code Development Elevating the Engineering Experience With No and Low Code Low code, no code, citizen development, AI automation, scalability — if you work in the tech world, it's likely that you have been encouraged to use tools in at least one of these spaces. And it's for a good reason as Gartner has projected that by 2025, 70% of applications developed within organizations will have been built using low- and/or no-code technologies. So does the practice live up to the hype? Year over year, the answer is a resounding "yes" as the industry continues to evolve. Organizations have an increased demand for more frequent application releases and updates, and with that comes the need for increased efficiencies. And this is where low-code and no-code development practices shine. Sprinkle AI automation into low- and no-code development, and the scalability opportunities are endless. This Trend Report covers the evolving landscape of low- and no-code development by providing a technical exploration of integration techniques into current development processes, the role AI plays in relation to low- and no-code development, governance, intelligent automated testing, and adoption challenges. In addition to findings from our original research, technical experts from the DZone Community contributed articles addressing important topics in the low code space, including scalability, citizen development, process automation, and much more. To ensure that you, the developer, can focus on higher priorities, this Trend Report aims to provide all the tools needed to successfully leverage low code in your tech stack.
Q2 2024 Cloud Native Championing Cloud Development Across the SDLC Cloud native has been deeply entrenched in organizations for years now, yet it remains an evolving and innovative solution across the software development industry. Organizations rely on a cloud-centric state of development that allows their applications to remain resilient and scalable in this ever-changing landscape. Amidst market concerns, tool sprawl, and the increased need for cost optimization, there are few conversations more important today than those around cloud-native efficacy at organizations. Google Cloud breaks down "cloud native" into five primary pillars: containers and orchestration, microservices, DevOps, and CI/CD. For DZone's 2024 Cloud Native Trend Report, we further explored these pillars, focusing our research on learning how nuanced technology and methodologies are driving the vision for what cloud native means and entails today. The articles, contributed by experts in the DZone Community, bring the pillars into conversation via topics such as automating the cloud through orchestration and AI, using shift left to improve delivery and strengthen security, surviving observability challenges, and strategizing cost optimizations.
Q2 2024 Modern API Management Connecting Data-Driven Architectures Alongside AI, Automation, and Microservices When assessing prominent topics across DZone — and the software engineering space more broadly — it simply felt incomplete to conduct research on the larger impacts of data and the cloud without talking about such a crucial component of modern software architectures: APIs. Communication is key in an era when applications and data capabilities are growing increasingly complex. Therefore, we set our sights on investigating the emerging ways in which data that would otherwise be isolated can better integrate with and work alongside other app components and across systems. For DZone's 2024 Modern API Management Trend Report, we focused our research specifically on APIs' growing influence across domains, prevalent paradigms and implementation techniques, security strategies, AI, and automation. Alongside observations from our original research, practicing tech professionals from the DZone Community contributed articles addressing key topics in the API space, including automated API generation via no and low code; communication architecture design among systems, APIs, and microservices; GraphQL vs. REST; and the role of APIs in the modern cloud-native landscape.