Tools
Adopt
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dbt continues to be our tool of choice for data transformations in the ELT workflow. We like that it lends itself to engineering rigor and enables practices like modularity, testability and reusability of SQL-based transformations. dbt is available both as an open-source and commercial SaaS product and has a healthy ecosystem, including a community hub with packages for unit testing, data quality and data observability, to name a few. Packages worth highlighting include dbt-expectations and dbt-unit-testing which facilitate data quality checks and unit testing of the transformations, respectively. dbt integrates well with a variety of cloud data warehouses, lakehouses and databases, including Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Databricks and Postgres. When working with structured data where one can set up transformations as SQL, our teams prefer dbt — which is why we're moving it to Adopt.
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Mermaid lets you generate diagrams from a Markdown-like markup language. Since we last featured it in the Radar, Mermaid has added support for many more diagrams and integrations with source code repositories, IDEs and knowledge management tools. Notably, it's supported natively in popular source code repositories such as GitHub and GitLab, enabling the embedding of and easy updates to Mermaid diagrams in the middle of Markdown documentation. Many of our teams gravitate toward Mermaid as their diagram-as-code tool due to its ease of use, multitude of integrations and wide variety of supported diagram types that keep growing.
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Ruff is a relatively new linter for Python. When it comes to linters, for us the question is not whether to use a linter but which linter to use. Ruff stands out for its out-of-box experience and its speed. It has more than 500 built-in rules and readily replaces Flake8, including many of that linter's plugins. The Ruff team’s claims about its performance are borne out by our experience; it really is at least an order of magnitude faster than other linters which is a huge benefit, because it helps reduce build times on large codebases. For these reasons, Ruff has become our default choice as a Python linter.
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Snyk provides both static application security testing (SAST) and software component analysis (SCA) tests to help you find, fix and monitor security issues throughout the software development lifecycle. Its broad range of features is designed to speed up the feedback loop, favoring a shift-left approach instead of the security sandwich anti-pattern. As one of the best security platforms available today, Snyk stands out because of its ability to identify a wider range of issues, enabled mainly by a dedicated research team adding to its vulnerability database. But there’s room for improvement: the dashboard currently doesn't provide an easy way to filter noise down to specific actionable information; depending on the language ecosystem, SCA-based integrations can output false positives compared to pipeline-based integrations because Snyk has to guess what the resolved dependencies are; automated resolution is not consistently successful; and significant integration investment is required in order to achieve proper gatekeeping or to establish an SBOM in high regulatory environments. Despite these shortcomings, many of our enterprise clients have adopted Snyk; we too are using it for our IT function.
Trial
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Multi-team account management is a challenge in AWS, especially in setup and governance. AWS Control Tower addresses this challenge by simplifying setup and automating governance; it addresses regulatory requirements with guardrails. AWS Control Tower has a built-in Account Factory that helps automate the account provisioning workflow. Among other things, you can update, unmanage and close accounts that you create and provision through Account Factory. Due to its lack of automation and customization, Amazon introduced AWS Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform (AFT). AFT allows you to provision customizations to send webhooks or take specific actions that allow for the integration with other tools to kick off jobs as part of the account creation process. One of the use cases leveraged by our team was to manage a set of out-of-the box items for accounts that were set-and-forget configurations for baselining and creating access for roles for GitHub Actions. This resulted in providing developers with an account that’s security baselined with a fully integrated VPC, ready to receive workload via GitHub Actions. Our teams have reported great results using AWS Control Tower to manage accounts, as a single access control for multiple teams, and with leveraging AFT in their workloads.
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Bloc is a reactive state management library for Flutter. Among the available state management options for Flutter, we want to highlight Bloc because our teams have had good experience with the library when building complex mobile applications. Structurally organizing code around the BLoC pattern resulted in clean separation of business logic from the presentation layer as the UI Widgets communicate via streams and event sinks with business logic. Bloc also has good plugin support in both IntelliJ and VSCode IDEs.
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cdk-nag identifies and reports security and compliance issues in AWS CDK applications or CloudFormation templates. It comes with several so-called packs of rules: a general AWS pack that includes checks for what AWS considers best practices, as well as packs for HIPAA, NIST, and PCI compliance. You can add additional rules as needed. Rules can result in either warnings or errors, both of which are included in reports generated by the tool. When errors are present, the
cdk deploycommand will not do deployments. If the cause of the error can't be fixed in time, you can still deploy with the error present but suppressed. Obviously, this should only be done in exceptional cases. -
Checkov is a specialized static security scanner for infrastructure as code (IaC). It supports a broad array of infra languages, including Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, CloudFormation templates and Terraform. Easily deployable in CI/CD pipelines, it safeguards against potential security gaps in diverse cloud infrastructure configurations. Leveraging a set of default rules, it identifies common security scenarios with detailed remediation advice available on its website. Checkov supports custom rules and uses YAML for simple guideline definitions or Python for crafting more complex ones. Our teams have successfully used Checkov to enhance security during infrastructure deployments, appreciating the early warnings it provides on potential issues before deployment.
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Chromatic is a visual regression testing tool to help catch UI regression in web applications. It works by taking snapshots of UI components and comparing them against previous snapshots when they change. It's a hosted service that integrates with popular cloud code hosting services. Built on top of Storybook, it does component-level visual regression testing. It can render the components in different viewport widths for responsive testing and integrates with CI workflows, generating the UI changeset for every commit, which makes it easy to review. Our teams find the visual difference between Chromatic and other tools in this space much better; the ability to highlight changes visually makes it particularly useful.
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eBPF is famous for its application transparency, high performance and low overhead. Thus the cloud-native community has been exploring its use case for service mesh without sidecar. Cilium is an open-source project that provides networking, security and observability for cloud-native environments such as Kubernetes clusters and other container orchestration platforms. It provides a simple flat Layer 3 network to routing or overlay and is L7 protocol aware. By decoupling security from addressing, Cilium could play a significant role as a new network protection layer. We've seen the adoption of Cilium among some cloud providers and have also used it in Thoughtworks projects. The community is still discussing whether eBPF can replace sidecar, but there appears to be consensus that some mesh features cannot or should not be executed in the kernel. In addition, applying Cilium also requires eBPF-related experience. Based on the positive results in our project, we recommend you try this technology yourself.
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Cloud Carbon Footprint (CCF) is an open-source tool that estimates carbon emissions for cloud workloads across the major cloud service providers. It queries cloud APIs for resource usage data and uses multiple sources to track carbon emissions. Following a published methodology, CCF combines these into emission estimates and provides a visualization of the data over time. Cloud providers have started adding similar offerings to their platforms, but organizations are still deploying CCF because it has all of the following features: It's open-source, designed to be extended, works across multiple clouds and has a transparent, published methodology. In addition, it also includes estimates for scope 2 and scope 3 emissions — for electricity use and hardware production, respectively. In our experiments, the estimates between different tools have varied, which is not a huge surprise given that all tools in this space make estimates and multiply estimated numbers. However, settling on one tool, taking a baseline and improving from that baseline is the key usage scenario we've come across, and tools like Kepler may reduce the need for estimates in the future. CCF also delivers GCP and AWS-sourced optimization recommendations, which not only help reduce your cloud carbon footprint but can also become part of a wider cloud cost optimization strategy. Thoughtworks is a significant contributor to CCF.
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Container Structure Tests (CST) is a tool developed by Google to test the structure of a container image. CST can be used to check the existence or absence of a certain file in the image's file system, to verify the content of a file, to check the output or errors inside a specific command issued in the container and to check the metadata of the container image (i.e., labels, entrypoint and command) which helps ensure compliance with the CIS Docker Benchmark. We've had good experiences with CST and recommend you give it a try. In addition to preventing vulnerabilities — checking whether the container is exposing unnecessary ports — we also used it to validate that each Docker container passes all requirements necessary for it to be deployed and to run an application in the enterprise's platform. One of these requirements was having an observability agent installed in the image. It's important to be aware that CST isn't officially supported by Google, which could impact maintenance.
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Devbox is a terminal-based tool that provides an approachable interface for creating reproducible, per-project development environments, leveraging the Nix package manager without using virtual machines or containers. Our teams use it to eliminate version and configuration mismatches of CLI tools and custom scripts in their per-project development environments, on top of the standardization that per-language package managers provide. They found that it notably streamlines their onboarding workflow because once it has been configured for a codebase, it takes one CLI command (
devbox shell) to stand it up in a new machine. Devbox supports shell hooks, custom scripts and devcontainer.json generation for integration with VSCode. -
DX DevEx 360 is a survey-based tool that helps find leading signals of developer productivity by focusing on frictions that developers face in their day-to-day work, such as the code review process, code quality, ability to do deep work and more. The survey is designed by Nicole Forsgren and Margaret-Anne Storey, who have led previous efforts like DORA and SPACE, among other experts.
Our platform engineering teams have used DX DevEx 360 successfully to understand developer sentiment and identify friction points to inform the platform roadmap. Unlike similar tools, with DX DevEx 360 we've received a response rate of 90% or above, often with detailed comments from developers on problems and ideas for improvements. We also appreciate that the tool makes results transparent to engineers in the company instead of just managers and that it enables team-by-team breakdown to enable continuous improvement for each team’s context.
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GitHub Copilot is used by many of our teams to help them write code faster. Overall, most of our developers find it very useful and would be cross if we took it away from them. We've been collating and sharing many of our experiences with Copilot through a series on Generative AI and a guide on getting started with Copilot. Note that GitHub Copilot can be used with any codebase, not just codebases hosted on GitHub.
We're also excited that Copilot's chat feature from the Copilot X roadmap has become more widely available since we last featured it in the Radar. It is a powerful addition to Copilot's in-line assistance feature. The availability of a chat interface inside the IDE improves the discoverability of commonly searched information, and integration with the open editor context makes it easy to explore errors or ask the chat to assist with tasks related to the code in focus.
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Since Postman announced in May 2023 that it would be sunsetting Scratch Pad mode with its offline capabilities, teams that need to keep API workspace data off third-party servers have had to find alternatives. Insomnia is one such alternative: it's a free and open-source desktop application designed for API testing, development and debugging. Although Insomnia supports online syncing, it'll let you keep API workspace data offline. Our teams have found migration from Postman for manual API testing seamless as its features are similar, and it allows importing of Postman collections. Despite our teams' positive experiences with Insomnia, we're keeping an eye on other developing alternatives of various forms — from GUI tools like Insomnia that are drop-in alternatives, to CLI tools like HTTPie, to IDE plugins such as IntelliJ HTTP client plugin.
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IntelliJ HTTP Client plugin allows developers to create, edit and execute HTTP requests inside the code editor, simplifying the development process when building and consuming APIs. It's becoming increasingly popular among our teams, who appreciate its user-friendly features and convenience. Its standout features include support for private files which safeguards sensitive keys by excluding them from git by default, version control and the ability to utilize variables which enhances the developer experience. Given its capacity to streamline developer workflows and bolster security measures, we recommend trying this tool.
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KEDA, the Kubernetes Event-Driven Autoscaler, does exactly what its name suggests: it enables the scaling of a Kubernetes cluster in relation to the number of events that must be processed. In our experience, using leading indicators like queue depth — rather than trailing indicators like CPU usage — is preferable. KEDA supports different event sources and comes with a catalog of more than 50 scalers for various cloud platforms, databases, messaging systems, telemetry systems, CI/CD systems and more. Our teams report that the ease with which KEDA can be integrated has allowed them to keep functionality in microservices in Kubernetes where they otherwise might have considered porting some of the event handling code to serverless functions.
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Kubeconform is a streamlined tool for validating Kubernetes manifests and custom resource definitions (CRD). Easily deployable in CI/CD pipelines or local machine setups, it fosters confidence by validating resources prior to deployment, thereby mitigating potential errors. Given its track record in enhancing operational assurance, especially with templated resources shared across teams, we recommend trialing Kubeconform to bolster the security and efficiency of your resource validation processes.
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mob is a command-line tool for seamless git handover in remote pair or mob programming. It hides all the version control paraphernalia behind a command-line interface that makes participating in mob programming sessions simpler. It also provides specific advice around how to participate remotely, for example, to "steal the screenshare" in Zoom rather than ending a screenshare, ensuring the video layout doesn't change for participants. Several of our teams highly recommend mob, and it has become an integral part of our toolchain in remote pair or mob programming.
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MobSF is an open-source, automated static and dynamic security testing tool for detecting security vulnerabilities in iOS and Android mobile apps. It scans both app sources and binaries and provides detailed reports about vulnerabilities. MobSF is distributed as Docker images and comes with easy-to-use REST APIs and, via mobsfscan, can be integrated into CI/CD pipelines. Our experience using MobSF for security testing Android apps has been positive; we recommend trying it for your mobile app security testing needs.
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Mocks Server is a Node.js-based API mocking tool valued by our teams for its ability to replicate intricate API responses, headers and status codes. The dynamic response generation supports the simulation of diverse scenarios, which allows for the rigorous testing of API interactions. Mocks can be described as YAML or JSON and managed through the CLI, REST API or JavaScript code. Mocks Server's features include request matching, proxying and record-playback features, which facilitate the emulation of realistic API interactions. We particularly like the integration with Docker containers, which makes it easy to deploy the server consistently between environments so it can be versioned and maintained as another artifact of the ecosystem. Its straightforward approach aligns with our emphasis on simplicity and efficiency in development processes. We look forward to using Mocks Server more extensively as our testing strategy evolves along with our solutions.
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Prisma runtime defense, which is a part of the Prisma Cloud suite, offers a new approach to container security. It employs a mechanism to build a model of a container's expected behavior, and then detects and blocks anomalous activities when some variance is found during the run time. It monitors container processes, network activities and file systems for patterns and changes that indicate an attack might be underway and blocks according to the configured rules. The models that learn what constitutes “normal” behaviors are built from both the static analysis of docker images and dynamic behavioral analysis for a preconfigured period. Our teams have found the results from our usage promising.
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Terratest continues to be an interesting option for infrastructure testing. It is a Golang library that makes it easier to write automated tests. Using infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform, you can create real infrastructure components (such as servers, firewalls or load balancers) to deploy applications on them and then validate the expected behavior using Terratest. At the end of the test, Terratest can undeploy the apps and clean up resources. Our teams report that this approach of testing deployed infrastructure components fosters confidence in the infrastructure as code. We see our teams writing a variety of infra security tests for application components and their integrations. These include detecting misconfigurations, verifying access control (e.g., to check whether certain IAM roles or permissions are correctly configured or to ensure only authorized users have access to specific resources) and network security tests to verify prevention of unauthorized traffic to sensitive resources to name a few. This allows security testing to be shifted left and provides feedback during development itself.
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Although Prometheus continues to be a solid option for a self-managed observability stack, many teams managing modern cloud-native distributed systems bump into its single-node limitations as their metrics grow in cardinality and sheer volume, and when they start needing high-availability setup. Thanos extends Prometheus by adding features that make it suitable for large-scale, long-term and highly available monitoring. It does this, for example, by introducing components that will read data from Prometheus instances and store it in object stores, manage retention and compaction in the object stores and federate querying across multiple Prometheus instances. Our teams have found the migration from Prometheus seamless, as Thanos maintains compatibility with the Prometheus query API. This means they can continue to use their existing dashboards, alerting tools and other tools that integrate with the Prometheus API. Although our teams have been successful with Thanos, we also recommend keeping an eye on Cortex, as another way to extend Prometheus.
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Yalc is a simple local JavaScript package repository and a tool for publishing and using packages across a local development environment. It's a more reliable alternative to the npm link command, which has some constraints. Yalc is useful when working with multiple packages, especially when some use yarn and some use npm. It's also helpful for testing the packages locally before publishing them to a remote registry. In our experience, Yalc is valuable in a multi-package setup and speeds up front-end and other JavaScript app development workflows.
Assess
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ChatGPT continues to attract attention. Imaginative use cases and innovative approaches to prompting mean it's gaining expanding utility over time. GPT4, the large language model (LLM) that powers ChatGPT, now also has the ability to integrate with external tools such as a knowledge management repository, sandboxed coding environment or web search. The recent introduction of ChatGPT Enterprise may help ease intellectual property concerns, while providing "enterprise" features such as usage tracking and better user management through SSO.
Although ChatGPT's ability to "write" code has been much vaunted, we think organizations should be looking at using it across the full software lifecycle to improve efficiency and reduce errors. For example, ChatGPT can provide additional perspectives or suggestions for tasks as diverse as requirements analysis, architectural design or the reverse engineering of legacy systems. We still think ChatGPT is best used as an input to a process — such as helping with a first draft of a story or the boilerplate for a coding task — rather than a tool that produces "fully baked" results. That said, its capabilities are improving each week, and some programming tasks may now be fully possible by careful prompting, which is an art in itself.
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In the AI-powered coding assistants space, Codeium is one of the more promising products. Similar to Tabnine, Codeium tries to address some of the biggest concerns companies have about coding assistants: They reduce at least some of the open-source licensing concerns, because they do not train their models with code from repositories with nonpermissive licenses. They also offer self-hosting for the tool so you don't have to send your code snippets to a third-party service. Codeium stands out for its broad support of IDEs and notebook services, and although it hasn't been around for as long as GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, our first impressions of the product have been positive.
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We've long been advocates of short-lived developer branches that are merged frequently into the main code branch, which is kept ready for deployment. This practice of trunk-based development goes hand-in-hand with continuous integration and, when conditions permit, results in the fastest feedback cycles and most efficient developer flow. However, not everyone favors this approach, and we frequently adapt our style to accommodate our clients’ practices. Sometimes this includes long-lived feature branches followed by pull requests that must be manually reviewed and approved before they're merged into the main branch. In these situations, we use the new GitHub merge queue feature. It allows us to automatically queue up incoming pull requests and merge them into a special branch in the order they were received. We then have the option of automating our own "merge checks" to prevent incompatible commits. This essentially simulates trunk-based development (even though PRs have not been merged into the main code branch yet) and allows developers to test their features in context without having to wait for the pull request to be approved. With GitHub merge queue, you get the benefits of trunk-based development even when you're not able to fully commit to it.
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Google Bard is a generative AI chatbot developed by Google AI. Much like ChatGPT, it’s conversational and able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions. Bard is powered by Google's Pathways Language Model (PaLM 2), which is a large language model (LLM) that’s trained on a massive data set of text and code. Bard is able to generate text, translate languages, write different kinds of creative content and answer your questions in an informative way.
Bard can also be used as a guidance tool for software development. Sometimes, our developers have found it useful to get some coding suggestions or best practices and infrastructure configurations for different scenarios. We also experimented with Bard for the Radar's language translations and got decent results to create the first draft of the text. Although the tool is still in development, which is why it can be a bit slower when compared to ChatGPT, we encourage developers to explore the tool and assess its potential benefits.
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Google Cloud Workstations is GCP's Cloud Development Environment (CDE) offering. It offers fully managed containerized development environments that are accessible through SSH, HTTPS, VSCode and Jetbrains IDEs among others, giving developers the illusion of connecting to a local environment. Google Cloud Workstations allows administrators to make the containerized development environments part of a private network and to be either publicly or privately accessible. This ability to tweak networking configurations, along with support to create the environments with either custom or predefined images, makes Google Cloud Workstations, in our view, worth assessing for organizations looking for a secure CDE solution within their own GCP perimeter. If you're considering Google Cloud Workstations, we recommend that you test your networking configuration before rolling it out widely, as high latency can become a real friction to the developer experience of these containers.
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Gradio is an open-source Python library that allows for the quick-and-easy creation of interactive web-based interfaces for ML models. A graphical user interface on top of ML models enables a better understanding of the inputs, constraints and outputs by nontechnical audiences. Gradio supports many input and output types — from text and images to voice — and has emerged as a go-to tool for rapid prototyping and model evaluation. Gradio lets you easily host your demos on Hugging Face or run them locally and enable others to access your demo remotely with a "XXXXX.gradio.app" url. For example, the famous DALL-E mini experiment leverages Gradio and is hosted on Hugging Face Spaces. Our teams have been happy using this library for experimentation and prototyping, which is why we put it in Assess.
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KWOK (Kubernetes WithOut Kubelet) is a tool for simulating the lifecycle of fake nodes and pods in order to test the control plane of a Kubernetes cluster. It is difficult to stress test custom Kubernetes controllers and operators without a significantly large cluster. However, with KWOK you can easily set up a cluster with thousands of nodes on your laptop without it consuming a significant amount of CPU or memory. This simulation enables different configurations of node types and pods to test various scenarios and edge cases. If you need a real cluster to test your operators and custom resource definitions (CRDs), we recommend kind or k3s; but if you only need to simulate a large number of fake nodes, then we encourage you to assess KWOK.
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Llama 2, from Meta, is a powerful language model that is free for both research and commercial use. It's available both as a raw pretrained model and, fine-tuned, as Llama-2-chat for conversation and Code Llama for code completion. Since it's available in a variety of sizes — 7B, 13B, and 70B — Llama 2 is a good option for a self-hosted LLM, if you want to control your data.
Meta describes Llama 2 as "open source," a claim that has attracted some criticism. Meta's license and acceptable use policy put restrictions on commercial use for some users and also restricts the use of the model and software for certain purposes. The Llama 2 training data is not open, which can hamper the ability to understand and change the model. That said, the availability of a powerful, capable model in at least a "semi-open" form is welcome.
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Maestro is a new cross-platform mobile UI test automation tool with built-in tolerance for flakiness and variance in application load times because of network or external factors. With a declarative YAML syntax, it makes it easy to write and maintain automated tests for mobile apps. It supports iOS and Android native apps, React Native and Flutter apps, as well as a variety of features for automating complex mobile UI interactions, such as tapping, scrolling and swiping. Maestro is distributed as a single binary for ease of use, runs in interpreted mode and makes it easy to author new tests thanks to features like continuous mode. Maestro still lacks specific features like support for iOS devices, but the tool is rapidly evolving.
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GitHub Copilot is a valuable tool for coding assistance while developing software. Under the hood, LLMs can power seamless developer experiences through inline code assistance, code fine-tuning, conversational support in the IDE and much more. Most of these models are proprietary and can only be used via subscription services. The good news is you can use several open-source LLMs for coding. If you’re in a space where you need to build your own coding assistance service (such as a highly regulated industry), look at models like StarCoder and WizardCoder. StarCoder is trained with a large data set maintained by BigCode, and Wizardcoder is an Evol-Instruct tuned StarCoder model.
We've used StarCoder in our experiments and found it to be useful for generating structured software engineering elements such as code, YAML, SQL and JSON. Based on our experiments, we found both the models to be receptive to in-context learning using few-shot examples in the prompt. Nonetheless, for specific downstream tasks (such as SQL generation for a specific database like Postgres) the models needed fine-tuning. Recently, Meta unveiled its Code Llama, a code-specialized version of Llama 2. Be sure to proceed with caution when using these open-source models. Consider their license, the license of the code and of the data set used to train the model. Carefully assess these aspects before you choose any of these coding LLMs for your organization.
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OpenCost is an open-source project for monitoring infrastructure cost that surfaces cost at the granularity of Kubernetes objects (pods, containers, clusters, etc.), covering various in-cluster resources (CPU, GPU, RAM, storage, network). It has integrations with multiple cloud provider APIs to obtain billing data and can be configured with pricing for on-premise Kubernetes clusters. OpenCost is the cost allocation engine originally built and still used by Kubecost, but it can also be used on its own. Cost allocation data from OpenCost can be exported into CSV files or to Prometheus for further analysis and visualization. Our teams are keenly watching the developments of tools like OpenCost and Kubecost that enable cost visibility for product and platform teams in organizations that have adopted Kubernetes. In these early stages, they find that OpenCost doesn't work well yet with certain workloads such as short-lived spot instances often used in data pipelines.
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We've seen several use cases for code intelligence tools: moving to a new API version of a widely used library, understanding the impact of a just discovered vulnerability in such a library across an enterprise or applying updates to many services that were created from the same template. Sourcegraph is still a popular tool in this space, and OpenRewrite is another tool we want to highlight. While our teams have mostly used it in Java for narrow problems, like updating services created through a starter kit, it continues to broaden its coverage of languages and use cases. We like that it comes bundled with a catalog of recipes, which describe the changes to be made, for example for migrating commonly used frameworks across versions. The refactoring engine, bundled recipes and build tool plugins are open-source software, which makes it easier for teams to reach for OpenRewrite just when they need it. It remains to be seen how the maturing space of code intelligence tools, which are all based on parsing the source code into an abstract syntax tree (AST), will be impacted by the rapid developments in the space of LLMs.
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OrbStack is a way to run Docker containers on macOS; our developers have found it to be more lightweight, faster and simpler to set up and use than Docker Desktop and Colima. The tool is still under development and therefore has fewer features, but it's already showing some great potential with its simplicity and speed. You can also use OrbStack to create and manage Linux VMs on macOS.
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Pixie is an observability tool for Kubernetes native applications. It takes an interesting approach toward observability by leveraging eBPF to automatically collect telemetry data from multiple data sources. Collected telemetry data is stored locally in each node and processed centrally via its control plane API. Overall, we find Pixie worthwhile to assess for observability in the Kubernetes ecosystem.
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Tabnine is a contender in the currently busy space of coding assistants. It provides in-line code completion suggestions and a chat directly in the IDE. Similar to GitHub Copilot, Tabnine has been around since before the current hype cycle and is therefore one of the more mature products in the space. Unlike Copilot, it uses a model that is only trained on permissively licensed code and offers a version to self-host for organizations that worry about sending their code snippets to a third-party service. Tabnine is available as a limited free version as well as a paid version, which has more comprehensive suggestions and also offers a mode with a local (albeit less powerful) model that you can use without internet connection.
Hold
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- Moved in/out
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Unable to find something you expected to see?
Each edition of the Radar features blips reflecting what we came across during the previous six months. We might have covered what you are looking for on a previous Radar already. We sometimes cull things just because there are too many to talk about. A blip might also be missing because the Radar reflects our experience, it is not based on a comprehensive market analysis.
Unable to find something you expected to see?
Each edition of the Radar features blips reflecting what we came across during the previous six months. We might have covered what you are looking for on a previous Radar already. We sometimes cull things just because there are too many to talk about. A blip might also be missing because the Radar reflects our experience, it is not based on a comprehensive market analysis.
