In the StackOverflow survey, respondents were asked what kinds of processes, tools, and programs were in place at their organizations. We see an increasing trend in organizations adopting modern development practices like creating a DevOps function, using CI/CD pipelines, and implementing more distributed system architectures like microservices.

Source: Responses to “Developer Experience: Processes, tools, and programs within an organization” –StackOverflow Developer Survey 2023

We can analyze the responses to the “Tools and Tech” survey question further, separating NoSQL developers from the general population. This overarching trend is also reflected in individual tools, as we can also see increased interest in streaming data tools like Kafka and RabbitMQ, as well as “Big Data” tools like Apache Spark and Hadoop:

Software Developers Generally Dislike Infrastructure Tools. There’s a general distaste for infrastructure tools across the board with the majority of tools showing decreased interest in “wanting to use” next year, whether it’s frontend or backend infrastructure. This makes sense as wrestling with tooling takes away from working on features and software development activities.

More Kubernetes, Please. While developers are looking to use less Docker, they seem to want to use more Kubernetes (or “k8s” for short). This could be a symptom of Docker’s recent Docker Desktop licensing changes, and a move to more open source friendly tooling. Since Kubernetes is designed for scaling and orchestrating container infrastructure, this could drive more demand for NoSQL solutions that are designed for better versioning for modern DevOps workflows since databases generally are difficult to version.

Tooling Will Become Easier and More Streamlined. Modern tools like Vite, Terraform, Cargo, pnpm, and Podman all offer a better developer experience, performance, and less friction than the tools they are meant to replace. This indicates developers will want to see increasing focus on developer experience.

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