2018 was a year of reckoning for the tech industry. Privacy moved from afterthought to priority. Security vulnerabilities made us question hardware trust. Kubernetes became the undisputed container orchestration standard. And the cloud wars intensified.
Here’s what mattered in 2018 and what it means for 2019.
Security Landscape
Spectre and Meltdown Changed Everything
The year opened with Spectre and Meltdown, vulnerabilities in CPU speculative execution. These weren’t bugs in software—they were flaws in how processors have been designed for decades.
Impact:
- Fundamental reassessment of hardware trust
- Performance overhead from mitigations
- Ongoing variants discovered throughout the year
- Industry-wide patching coordination
Lessons:
- Hardware isn’t inherently secure
- Defense in depth matters more than ever
- Patching infrastructure needs to move faster
Growing Attack Surface
Major breaches continued:
- Marriott: 500 million records
- Facebook: 50 million accounts
- British Airways: 380,000 payment cards
Trend: Supply chain attacks increased. Compromising one vendor compromises many customers.
Security Practices Maturing
Positive developments:
- Bug bounty programs became standard
- Security teams integrated earlier in development
- Automated security scanning in CI/CD
- Zero trust architecture gaining adoption
Privacy Becomes Real
GDPR Enforcement
May 25th marked GDPR enforcement. Despite years of preparation, many organizations scrambled.
What changed:
- Consent became meaningful (no pre-checked boxes)
- Data subject rights enforceable
- Privacy notices became clearer
- Cookie banners everywhere (for better or worse)
Early enforcement:
- Regulators prioritizing education over fines (mostly)
- Complaints filed, investigations ongoing
- Industry expecting significant fines in 2019
Privacy as Competitive Advantage
Apple positioned privacy as a feature. Companies started advertising privacy practices. Consumers became more aware (if not more careful).
Trend: Privacy-first design becoming a differentiator.
California Consumer Privacy Act
California passed CCPA, bringing GDPR-like rights to the US’s largest state. Effective January 2020, but preparation starts now.
Cloud and Infrastructure
Kubernetes Wins
The container orchestration wars ended. Kubernetes won decisively:
- Docker Swarm: minimal new adoption
- Mesos/Marathon: stable but not growing
- Kubernetes: industry standard
2018 developments:
- Kubernetes 1.10-1.13 with significant improvements
- Service mesh (Istio) matured
- Managed Kubernetes everywhere (EKS, AKS, GKE)
Multi-Cloud Becomes Real
Organizations increasingly deploy across providers:
- Avoiding vendor lock-in
- Leveraging provider-specific strengths
- Regulatory requirements
- Disaster recovery
Tools evolving:
- Terraform for multi-cloud provisioning
- Kubernetes as abstraction layer
- Cloud-agnostic services
Serverless Matures
AWS Lambda turned 4. The ecosystem matured:
- Better tooling (Serverless Framework, SAM)
- More use cases validated
- Understood limitations
- Enterprise adoption increasing
Reality check: Serverless isn’t replacing containers. Each has a place.
Infrastructure as Code Standard
IaC moved from best practice to expectation:
- Terraform became default
- GitOps emerged as practice
- Policy as code (Sentinel, OPA)
- Compliance as code
Development Practices
DevOps Normalized
DevOps is no longer novel—it’s expected:
- “You build it, you run it” widely adopted
- SRE practices spreading
- Platform teams enabling self-service
- Observability becoming standard
API Design Matured
GraphQL gained significant adoption. REST remained dominant but more thoughtfully designed:
- API versioning strategies established
- Documentation standards improved
- API gateways became common
- Contract testing emerging
Machine Learning in Production
ML moved beyond experimentation:
- MLOps practices emerging
- Feature stores developed
- Model monitoring improved
- AutoML for non-specialists
Still early, but foundations being built.
Languages and Frameworks
Go Continues Rising
Go became the default for:
- Cloud infrastructure tools
- CLI applications
- Network services
- DevOps tooling
Go 1.11 brought modules, improving dependency management significantly.
Rust Gains Traction
Rust moved from curious to practical:
- Increasing production usage
- Major companies (Mozilla, Dropbox, Cloudflare) using it
- WebAssembly connection
- Systems programming revival
TypeScript Mainstream
TypeScript is no longer optional for serious JavaScript:
- Major frameworks support it
- New projects default to TypeScript
- Type safety expectations rising
- JavaScript fatigue stabilizing
Looking to 2019
Expect More Of
Kubernetes everywhere: The standard solidifies. Focus shifts to operations and security.
Edge computing: Processing at the edge for latency, bandwidth, and privacy.
Machine learning ops: Production ML practices mature.
Security automation: Shift-left continues, security in CI/CD standard.
Privacy regulation: CCPA enforcement, more jurisdictions following.
Watch For
5G implications: New architectures for high-bandwidth, low-latency mobile.
WebAssembly beyond browsers: Server-side WASM, plugins, edge computing.
GraphQL adoption: Mainstream adoption in new projects.
Developer experience focus: Platform teams, internal tools, productivity.
Questions for 2019
- How will GDPR fines shape industry behavior?
- Will quantum computing concerns become practical?
- How will trade tensions affect technology supply chains?
- Will we see hardware security standards emerge?
Personal Reflections
What I Learned
1. Security requires continuous attention. Spectre/Meltdown reminded us that no layer is inherently secure.
2. Privacy is engineering work. GDPR wasn’t just legal compliance—it required significant technical implementation.
3. Kubernetes is just the beginning. The platform is stable, but the ecosystem is still forming.
4. Managed services reduce toil. Not managing infrastructure lets us focus on business value.
What I’m Doing Differently
More security review earlier. Security can’t be bolted on.
Privacy by design. Consider data minimization and retention from the start.
Observability investment. Distributed systems require distributed understanding.
Team development. Technical skills matter, but team health matters more.
Key Takeaways
- Spectre/Meltdown challenged fundamental hardware trust assumptions
- GDPR made privacy real; enforcement coming
- Kubernetes won container orchestration; focus shifts to operations
- Serverless and containers coexist; right tool for right job
- Infrastructure as Code is expected, not optional
- DevOps practices normalized; SRE spreading
- Security must shift left; automation essential
- 2019 will bring more edge computing, ML ops, and privacy regulation
2018 was a year of maturation. Technologies emerged from hype to production. Practices moved from novel to standard. 2019 will build on these foundations.