Take a deeper look at Technology Radar Vol.32

Hello!

We released Technology Radar Vol.32 at the start of April. We hope you’ve had a chance to take a look and explore some of the things we’ve found interesting recently. 

If you’re not sure where to start when it comes to diving in, we’ve identified some highlights across different areas of tech we think deserve your attention.

Best wishes,

Ken Mugrage

Principal Technologist, Thoughtworks

AI

AI features heavily in this edition of the Technology Radar. Almost half the blips are AI-related, and two of the four themes are related to AI: supervised agents in coding assistants and R in RAG.

Coding assistance is something we’ve been experimenting with a lot in recent months. We’re particularly excited about software engineering agents [Tools/Trial], and suggest trialling a couple of tools that do a good job of facilitating this approach, Cursor [Tools/Trial] and Cline [Tools/Trial].

That said, while there’s lots to be optimistic about, we also wanted to acknowledge some risks and antipatterns. That’s why we again included complacency with AI-generated code and put replacing pair programming with AI in Hold.

Other AI-related blips worth exploring in more detail... 

• GraphRAG [Techniques/Trial] and Fast GraphRAG [Languages & Frameworks/Assess], two retrieval-augmented generation techniques that use graph databases to improve retrieval.
• Model Context Protocol [Platforms/Assess], a standard designed to make it easier to connect sources of data to LLMs.
• Models including Claude Sonnet 3.5 [Tools/Trial] and DeepSeek R1 [Platforms/Assess] (which made waves just weeks before we put this edition together).
• LLM observability tools including Weights & Biases Weave [Platforms/Trial], Helicone [Platforms/Assess] and Arize Phoenix [Platforms/Assess].

Security

The dominance of AI in the technology landscape means there are new security challenges. That’s why we’ve once again included threat modeling [Techniques] in Adopt, which last appeared in October 2022. 

Also in Adopt is Software Bill of Materials [Techniques]. Incidentally, it too last appeared on the Radar in October 2022 (in Trial), but we think the ecosystem has matured in recent years. There are many options out there on the market, but in an environment of increasing complexity and risk, it’s something worth investing time and money in.

Another software supply chain tool featured on the Radar is Chainloop [Platforms/Assess], an open-source supply chain security platform that helps security teams enforce compliance while allowing development teams to seamlessly integrate security compliance into CI/CD pipelines.

More security blips worth exploring…

• Plerion [Tools/Trial], an AWS-focused cloud security platform that integrates with hosting providers to uncover risks, misconfigurations and vulnerabilities across your cloud infrastructure, servers and applications.
• Just-in-time privileged access management [Techniques/Trial], where system access is granted only when needed and revoked immediately after to minimize security risks.

Data

Given AI’s predominance, it might not be surprising to see data-related blips also featured heavily on this volume of the Radar. We specifically spotlighted data product thinking [Techniques/Adopt] as a technique for how teams and organizations manage their data. We see it as critical not only for AI-readiness, but also to ensure regulatory compliance and, more broadly, to create a truly data-driven culture.

We also placed reverse ETL [Techniques] in Hold. This is because we’re seeing a trend where product vendors are using the approach as an excuse to move increasing amounts of business logic into a centralized platform. Although it occasionally makes sense to move data back from a central analytics system to a transaction system — such as when the central system can aggregate data from multiple sources — it does require caution.

More data blips worth exploring…

• Trino [Platforms/Adopt], an open-source, distributed SQL query engine designed for interactive analytic queries over big data.
• Pg_mooncake [Platforms/Assess], a PostgreSQL extension that adds columnar storage and vectorized execution.
• Metabase [Tools/Trial] an open-source analytics and business intelligence tool that allows users to visualize and analyze data from a variety of data sources.
• Databricks Delta Live Tables [Tools/Trial], a data engineering tool that simplifies and streamlines data pipeline management.

Web and app development

In web and app development, one of the most intriguing discussions was around Swift — that’s why we put Swift for resource-constrained applications [Languages & Frameworks/Assess] on this volume. Although of course it is primarily known for iOS and Apple development, its features since Swift 6.0 have made it a solid competitor to the likes of Rust, C and C++.

Another thing we’re excited by is Vite [Tools/Adopt]. We placed it in Trial two years ago but moved it to Adopt in this edition as it has matured. It’s a high-performance front-end build tool with fast hot-reloading that’s quickly becoming the default choice in many front-end frameworks.

More web and app development blips…

• PrismaORM [Languages & Frameworks/Trial], an open-source database toolkit that simplifies working with databases in Node.js and TypeScript applications.
• Android XR SDK [Languages & Frameworks/Assess], a software development kit for Android’s XR headset operating system.
• Tamagui [Languages & Frameworks/Assess], a library for sharing styles between React web and React Native.
• Node overload [Languages & Frameworks/Hold] — using NodeJS without considering alternatives despite data-heavy workloads.

Cloud and infrastructure 

OpenTelemetry [Languages & Frameworks/Adopt] speaks to the 'evolving observability' trend for this edition. It’s essentially a standard for observability, ensuring consistency in how we handle logs, traces and metrics. Also featuring on this edition — in Trial — are a number of observability tools from Grafana, including Grafana Alloy [Platforms/Trial], an all-in-one telemetry collector, Grafana Loki [Platforms/Trial], a multi-tenant log aggregation system and Grafana Tempo [Platforms/Trial], a high-scale distributed tracing backend. All three support OpenTelemetry.

More cloud and infrastructure blips…

• Competence envelope as a model for understanding system failures [Techniques/Assess], a way to analyze how a system adapts under stress.
• Railway [Platforms/Trial], a cloud platform that streamlines everything from GitHub/Docker deployment to production observability.
• Kubenetmon [Tools/Assess], which offers detailed Kubernetes data transfer metering across major cloud providers.
• System Initiative [Tools/Assess], a tool for managing production infrastructure that represents a possible alternative to infrastructure as code.

Testing

We put fuzz testing [Techniques] into Adopt in this volume. It’s not a new technique, of course, but we do think it deserves to be better known — even more importantly, in an age of AI, it can be really valuable as a corrective to complacency around AI-generated code.

More testing blips…

• AI-powered UI testing [Techniques/Assess]
• ABSmartly [Platforms/Trial] an A/B testing and experimentation platform designed for rapid decision-making
• Mailslurp [Tools/Trial], a mail server and SMS API service.