2020 will be remembered as the year everything changed. A global pandemic forced the largest remote work experiment in history. Cloud adoption accelerated by years. And as the year closes, the SolarWinds breach reminds us that security challenges persist.
Here’s the technology year in review.
The Great Remote Migration
Overnight Transformation
In March, millions suddenly worked from home:
Before March 2020:
- Remote work: nice to have
- Video calls: occasional
- Cloud tools: partial adoption
- VPN: for some workers
After March 2020:
- Remote work: mandatory
- Video calls: all day, every day
- Cloud tools: essential
- VPN: breaking under load
What Scaled
Video conferencing: Zoom went from 10 million to 300 million daily participants.
Collaboration tools: Slack, Teams, Notion saw massive adoption.
Cloud infrastructure: AWS, Azure, GCP handled unprecedented demand.
What Broke
VPNs: Not designed for everyone working remotely.
Corporate laptops: Supply chains couldn’t meet demand.
IT support: Helpdesks overwhelmed with remote setup.
Lasting Changes
Remote work isn’t going back:
- Companies embracing hybrid models
- Office real estate reconsidered
- Distributed teams normalized
- Asynchronous communication valued
Cloud Acceleration
Multi-Year Shift in Months
Cloud adoption timeline:
Pre-pandemic projection: 5 years to current state
Actual: Happened in months
Drivers:
- Scalability requirements
- Remote access needs
- Reduce on-prem dependencies
- Business continuity
Kubernetes Maturity
Kubernetes became infrastructure standard:
- Managed services (EKS, GKE, AKS) dominated
- GitOps went mainstream
- Service mesh adoption (cautiously)
- Operators for stateful workloads
Serverless Growth
Lambda, Cloud Functions saw increased adoption:
- Event-driven architectures
- Pay-per-use appealing during uncertainty
- Less operational overhead
Security Landscape
SolarWinds Wake-Up Call
The year ended with the most significant supply chain attack in history:
- Nation-state attackers compromised build system
- 18,000 organizations received trojanized updates
- Government agencies and enterprises affected
- Months of undetected access
Implications:
- Software supply chain security prioritized
- Build system security reconsidered
- Trust but verify for all vendors
Remote Work Security
Challenges emerged:
- Home networks are not corporate networks
- BYOD expanded attack surface
- Phishing attacks increased
- VPN vulnerabilities exploited
Responses:
- Zero trust architecture adoption accelerated
- Endpoint security prioritized
- Security awareness training expanded
Ransomware Surge
Ransomware attacks increased:
- Healthcare systems targeted
- Schools and municipalities hit
- Ransom demands reached millions
- Double extortion (encrypt + leak)
Developer Experience
Tooling Improvements
GitHub:
- Actions matured significantly
- Codespaces launched (cloud dev environments)
- Native CI/CD became competitive
VS Code:
- Remote development features
- Live Share for collaboration
- Continued ecosystem growth
API-First Development
APIs as products:
- Stripe, Twilio model spreading
- Developer experience as differentiator
- API-first design standard
Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, Pulumi adoption grew:
- Infrastructure changes reviewed like code
- GitOps workflows
- Reproducible environments
Architecture Trends
Event-Driven Systems
Async architectures gained favor:
- Decoupled systems more resilient
- Kafka, Pulsar adoption
- Event sourcing for audit trails
GraphQL Maturation
Federation enabled team autonomy:
- Multiple teams contributing to unified API
- Schema registry and governance
- Production patterns established
Edge Computing
Processing moved closer to users:
- Cloudflare Workers, Lambda@Edge
- Lower latency for distributed users
- Personalization at edge
Hardware Shifts
Apple Silicon
M1 changed the conversation:
- ARM performance competitive with x86
- Efficiency leadership
- Developer workflow implications
ARM Servers
AWS Graviton demonstrated viability:
- Better price/performance
- Growing adoption
- Multi-architecture builds becoming standard
What We Learned
About Remote Work
- It works, for many roles
- Async communication is essential
- Explicit documentation matters more
- Team bonding requires intention
- Burnout is real without boundaries
About Resilience
- Systems that scaled: cloud-native, distributed
- Systems that struggled: legacy, on-prem, VPN-dependent
- Lesson: design for uncertainty
About Security
- Supply chain is critical attack vector
- Trust but verify, even for vendors
- Zero trust isn’t just network architecture
- Remote work expanded attack surface
Looking Forward
2021 Predictions
Likely:
- Hybrid work becomes standard
- Zero trust adoption accelerates
- Supply chain security prioritized
- ARM servers gain share
Possible:
- eBPF-based networking goes mainstream
- WebAssembly finds server-side use cases
- Platform engineering emerges as discipline
Uncertain:
- Full return to offices (probably not)
- Quantum computing impact (still years away)
- Regulation of big tech (varies by region)
Personal Reflections
What I Got Right
- Bet on remote-first practices
- Invested in automation
- Focused on documentation
What I Missed
- Underestimated VPN scaling issues
- Supply chain security wasn’t on radar
- Video fatigue is real
What I’m Changing
- More async, fewer meetings
- Security posture review
- Better work-life boundaries
Key Takeaways
- 2020 was remote work’s moment; hybrid is the future
- Cloud adoption accelerated by years; on-prem declined
- Kubernetes is boring now (in a good way); managed services dominate
- SolarWinds breach is a watershed for supply chain security
- Zero trust moved from concept to implementation necessity
- ARM architecture proved itself; multi-arch builds are table stakes
- Developer experience improvements continued despite everything
- Resilience is about design, not just hope
- The industry adapted remarkably well
2020 tested everything. Systems that were designed for resilience handled it. The rest had a hard year. Those lessons will shape technology decisions for years to come.
Here’s to a better 2021. Stay safe, and keep building.