While the tech industry’s excitement about the generative AI paradigm shift¹ is very understandable – it’s not the only thing happening in tech. When we think about the year 2024, I do believe there are four promising tech trends you should be conscious of – besides AI – the Edge, next-gen apps, composability, and low code – which all align with the more business-centric projections by the analytics giants like Gartner or IDC.

In addition to the four above, I’m also keeping tabs on a few less prominent shifts that might or might not occur, like the Fediverse or the move towards vanilla web techs.

The Edge, or managed cloud 2.0

While I’ve been explaining the Edge as running your app’s backend in the CDN, I like the description from the good people at Deno² a lot more: ”[…] your site or app is going to be hosted simultaneously on multiple servers around the globe, always close to a user […] These distributed servers not only serve static assets, but can also execute custom code that can power a dynamic web app.”

That does not sound revolutionary in itself; but combining it with the cost savings, ease, and simplicity the Edge providers offer, we are on the verge of significantly shifting towards more managed cloud solutions³.

The rise of Next-gen user experience

Next-gen is something that I agree 100% with Gartner about, even if my rationale is a bit different. We are seeing multiple application and user experience technologies developing and maturing rapidly.

Whether the next-gen starts from Apple XR glasses, or multiple web technologies becoming native to the platform does not matter – when we see a new tech emerging at this pace, someone will come up with a new gen experience pattern.

In a more conservative view, some tech bloggers predict the winners of this race will be decided based on the developer experience and tooling - which have been emerging as a side effect of the tech stack maturing⁴.

The emergence of Composable Architecture

The simplest way to understand composability is to see it as the next natural progression of solution architectures. It’s a way of connecting application heads and backend services in a straightforward and action-based way.

Driven by eCommerce and transaction-heavy applications, the pattern is quickly gaining popularity. As a more coherent and actionable pattern than its ancestors, it will likely steal the wind from event-driven, microservices and API-first movements.

The revenge of Low Code

As a long-time pundit for low-code and no-code, I’m hesitant to paint low-code as a significant trend. Low code is domain-centric, inflexible, and limited in scope.

But there are domains where you want to work with domain-specific tools. Where it is possible to create suitable applications within the limited scope of these tools, we are now seeing much innovation. Be it from the Microsoft Power Platform or SalesForce’s Einstein.

Based on what I hear from the field - I would not be surprised if low-code becomes a major selling point for many SaaS solutions, and integrators in the coming year.

Bubbling under

In addition to the above, I’m keeping tabs on distributed social media, framework-less web, and green IT. With the demise of X/Twitter and Meta going federated with Threads - it might be time to up the distributed social media to the main list. Whereas framework-less web and green IT are closely linked enough to the trends above, I do not see them as contenders to the main list⁵