Tech Radar - Quarterly Report Q4

Technology is developing at lightning speed and will only gain momentum in the coming years. To stay ahead, we believe it’s necessary to continue to look critically at all the techniques we use to realise our work. An important tool we use for this is the Harborn Tech Radar. In it, we provide insight into all the tools and techniques we use. The Tech Radar makes it possible to continue experimenting in a well-organised manner, and challenges us to continuously examine familiar techniques as well.

Every quarter we conduct an official review and discuss insights with all our colleagues. To get the new quarter off to a good start, I’ll share the most important developments with you:

The choice for monitoring falls on Grafana

Grafana enters the trial ring of our Tech Radar out of nowhere. We have chosen to use Grafana as our monitoring tooling state-of-the-art cloud (AWS) based container (Kubernetes and Rancher) hosting platform. Grafana provides us with real-time insight into the environment, enabling us to act proactively to prevent rather than fix disruptions.

AWS Powertools seems to be on its way to the adopt ring

Last quarter, AWS Powertools entered the assess ring at the last minute. This quarter, Powertools is moving straight into the trial ring, and we expect it won't be long before Powertools is the default choice for all our serverless projects. Indeed, we expect that AWS Powertools will make it easy to choose best practices during serverless development and avoid having to reinvent the wheel every time.

The next three to six months will show whether Powertools will indeed become our best practice in serverless development.

Serverless SQL with Athena

Our data solutions are increasingly using AWS Athena, to make data from S3 buckets available via SQL. That’s why we have chosen to move Athena from the assess ring to the trial ring. We expect that in most cases Athena will be the best way to access data from buckets with SQL. Athena offers very low-threshold SQL access to the data, unlike most other tools where data must first be imported into a database.

Will ReactJS make the choice for VueJS less obvious in the future?

ReactJS and NextJS are coming from the hold ring to the assess ring. The continued popularity of ReactJS has made us decide to start working with it. By using both VueJS and ReactJS, we expect to be able to offer our customers a choice between these two popular front-end frameworks.

Clean-up campaign

This quarter, we cleaned up our Tech Radar and removed the techniques we no longer use. No fewer than 14 techniques can no longer be found. This has made the Tech Radar a lot clearer. The techniques on the radar are all in use by us or are planned to be experimented with in the coming months.