O’Reilly Media analyzed data from the 2.8 million users of its learning platform to find out what developers wanted to learn in 2022. And, unsurprisingly, AI was the top topic of interest.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) content saw a 42% year-over-year growth spike, while the underlying Deep Learning category was the second most used subject, with a growth of 23%, according to O’Reilly’s Technology Trends for 2023 report.
O’Reilly’s snapshot of learning trends is based on its internal “units viewed” metric, which measures how often IT developers view ebooks, videos and live training courses. on key topics.
“GPT-3: everything you’ve done so far is outdated”
While some topics boomed, others slowed: Interest in reinforcement learning fell 14%, while content on chatbots fell 5.8%.
Mike Loukides, vice president of emerging technology content at O’Reilly, notes that the drop in views of chatbot learning modules “seems counterintuitive,” but makes sense, given the interest in ChatGPT and OpenAI’s GPT-3 and -3.5 large language models.
“The release of GPT-3 was a watershed moment, a moment when ‘everything you’ve done so far is surpassed’,” writes Loukides. “We’re excited about what’s to come in 2023, although results will very much depend on how ChatGPT and its kin are marketed, with Microsoft moving towards offering ChatGPT as a cloud service.”
Linux and Kubernetes: DevOps, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, Puppet, service mesh and Istio
O’Reilly’s ranking of programming language popularity revealed a few surprises. Java and Python were by far the leaders and saw minor gains, while interest in Rust and Go grew by 20% each. Go is the third most popular language, followed by C++, JavaScript, C#, C, Rust, TypeScript, Microsoft’s JavaScript superset, R, Kotlin, and Scala. This order is quite different from the rankings of RedMonk and Tiobe.
When it comes to infrastructure and operations, containers, Linux, and Kubernetes are the most important topics. Containers grew by 2.5%, while Linux and Kubernetes grew by 4.4% each on the year. Content on the service mesh, part of the Kubernetes ecosystem, saw a 28% decline, while content on Istio – the service mesh implementation most closely tied to Kubernetes – decreased by 42%.
The main topics behind containers, Linux and Kubernetes are DevOps, Docker, Terraform, Ansible, site reliability engineering, Puppet, service mesh and Istio.
Interest in the public cloud is waning
Interest in Terraform, HashiCorp’s “infrastructure as code” tool, saw a significant increase of 74%. “Terraform’s goals are relatively simple: You write a simple description of the infrastructure you want and how you want that infrastructure configured. Terraform gathers the resources and configures them for you,” says Loukides.
Interest in learning tools from specific cloud players was dominated by Amazon Web Services, followed by Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud and IBM Cloud. While the three big players dominated, they all declined year-over-year usage: AWS was down 3.8%, Azure by 7.5%, and Google Cloud by 2.1%.
O’Really does not know what caused this decline. However, Loukides points to a potential suspect that is being talked about more these days: public cloud repatriation, meaning companies bringing their cloud-hosted applications in-house.
“Companies moving to the cloud have often underestimated the costs”
“Cost is the primary motivation for repatriation; companies moving to the cloud have often underestimated the costs, in part because they have failed to use the cloud effectively,” he writes.
“While repatriation is arguably responsible for some of the decline, at best it’s only a small part of the story. Cloud providers are making it hard to leave, which, ironically, could lead to more content usage as IT staff try to figure out how to recover their data.A bigger problem could be companies putting their cloud computing plans on hold because they hear about repatriation or who postpone major IT projects for fear of a recession.”
Source : “ZDNet.com”
