RedMonk November 2025 Update
A small, sharp research firm focusing on developer-led technology adoption and developer culture. We help folks understand the industry by understanding you.
Sometimes people attack you with cruel and vicious truths. For example, take this Halloween post from Amanda Casari.
Innocuous, you say? No, this is clearly a personal and direct attack on me, Rachel Stephens. How dare someone make me acknowledge how little time we have left to get everything done? Rude.
And yet here we are, staring down the end-of-year gauntlet. We just returned from KubeCon Atlanta, and our collective descent upon Las Vegas for re:Invent is coming up fast. Between holidays and conferences, there are frightfully few heads-down days left in the year.
We’re in the thick of it here at RedMonk, but amid the meetings, the travel, the hallway-track conversations, and the scramble to get research done, some of us even managed to publish a book. Go check out Progressive Delivery from James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse and Adam Zimman and learn about delivering the right thing to the right people at the right time.
Your calendar might be chaotic, but your software delivery process doesn’t have to be. Let’s get to work!
- Rachel Stephens
Links Roundup
The Python Software Foundation withdraws from a U.S. government grant process when the process required a condition that "would be a betrayal of our mission and our community" and is instead seeking $1.5M in funding elsewhere. (Want to be a PSF supporting member? Here's the form)
Versioned rollback is finally a thing in Kubernetes.
We are old enough to remember when if a company approached a VC and said they were raising money for a dev tools startup they would have been laughed at. Obviously that was a while ago, but a $2.3bn raise on a VS Code fork/Claude Sonnet wrapper is quite impressive all the same.
Recent RedMonk Research
Rachel Stephens highlights the release of Progressive Delivery, the new book from James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, and Adam Zimman. The core message: shipping isn’t about going faster. It’s about delivering the right changes at the right time with lower risk and cost.
“The playbook for modern delivery is here.”
In his blog post, James Governor also announces the launch of the book Progressive Delivery: Build the Right Thing for the Right People at the Right Time. The book presents a framework built on four pillars – Abundance, Automation, Alignment, Autonomy – to help engineering and product teams deliver value rather than just ship features.Don’t ditch Java just because AI is hot. According to James Governor, Java remains highly relevant in the enterprise-AI era thanks to strong JVM ecosystems and emerging frameworks like LangChain4J and Embabel, which enable developers to integrate large language models and agent workflows into business-critical systems. With concerns like explainability, security and scale growing louder, the tried-and-true Java platform could be your smarter path forward, not a legacy liability. RM clients mentioned: IBM, Red Hat, Microsoft, Oracle and Broadcom
“Logs aren’t just noise - they’re a hidden cost and opportunity.” In his article, James Governor explains how the explosion of telemetry (logs, metrics, traces) is driving up storage and compute costs, especially when high-cardinality data like user IDs or IP addresses are involved. The upshot? Organizations are embracing “Log Data Management” (LDM) – a distinct discipline focused on routing, refining, compressing and retaining log data selectively to control cost and complexity, rather than simply dumping everything into a lake. RM clients mentioned: Splunk, Cribl, Chronosphere, Control Theory, Honeycomb, AWS, Microsoft (Azure), and Google Cloud
After nearly two years under Broadcom ownership, VMware’s cloud-infrastructure mainstay is stabilising fast. The platform has dropped complexity (and even list pricing), shifted to subscription licensing, and sharpened its focus on running both VM-based and container-native workloads – targeting cloud admins, platform engineers and devs alike. RM clients mentioned: VMware and IBM
In his blog post, Stephen O'Grady examines this year’s GitHub Universe and finds that instead of launching a seismic new product, GitHub is quietly shifting into high gear, shipping hundreds of incremental improvements, solidifying its enterprise credentials, and staking its claim as the stable, incumbent platform in a post-hype AI tooling market. RM clients mentioned: AWS (Kiro), GitHub, Google (Gemini et al), IBM (Bob) and Microsoft
In his latest post, James Governor explores how the meteoric rise of Cursor (a VS Code fork) has highlighted deeper ecosystem tensions — namely, Open VSX, the Eclipse-led open registry for VS Code-compatible extensions, is emerging as a counter-balance to Microsoft’s marketplace control. RM clients mentioned: AWS, The Eclipse Foundation and Microsoft
In her article, Kate Holterhoff argues that despite years of progress, networking—and all its overlays, policies, ingress/egress, and cross-cluster connectivity—still dominates cloud-native complexity. The title, “Networking Is the Hydra of Kubernetes,” captures it: cut off one head (e.g., service mesh), and another grows (e.g., cluster mesh, eBPF dataplanes). RM clients mentioned: Splunk (Cisco)
Recent Videos and Media Appearances
In this RedMonk Conversation from IBM’s TechXchange conference, Matt Rodkey, Program Director, Product Management at IBM, speaks about and demos Bob, IBM’s newly announced agentic IDE, with Kate Holterhoff: A RedMonk Conversation: Meet Bob, IBM’s Agentic IDE (with Matt Rodkey at IBM TechXchange 2025)
James Governor sits down with Anush Elangovan, VP of AI at AMD, to dig into the fast-evolving world of local LLMs, edge hardware, and the future of AI-powered developer experience: A RedMonk Conversation: Introduction to local AI models
Exclusively on the MonkCast
What happens when you build an ultra low-latency compute platform and then realize the round trips are going to kill you? Absent changing physics or your cap table: you partner!
This RedMonk Conversation explores how Fermyon – a platform that compiles serverless compute into Wasm – partnered with Akamai – a company that started out as a CDN and has evolved into a full-fledged alternative cloud – to build a better together story. Join Rachel Stephens, Fermyon CEO Matt Butcher, and Akamai’s Director of Product Management Allen Duet to discuss the future of serverless computing at the edge.In this RedMonk conversation, Deb Nicholson, Executive Director of the Python Software Foundation, discusses the PSF’s responsibilities, recent challenges with a government grant proposal, and the community’s strong support with Kate Holterhoff. The conversation highlights the importance of cybersecurity in open source, the role of PyPI, and the evolving landscape of programming languages. Deb emphasizes the PSF’s mission to support the global Python community and the significance of educational initiatives in teaching Python effectively: A RedMonk Conversation: Why the Python Software Foundation Withdrew a $1.5 Million US Government Grant Proposal (with Deb Nicholson)
In this RedMonk conversation, Jack Bridger, host of Scaling Devtools and Developer Experience at Layercode, chats with Kate Holterhoff about founders. Jack shares insights from his interviews with founders on the importance of understanding users, overcoming fear in business, and challenges faced in the startup ecosystem. They also discuss marketing strategies around the role of differentiation, and the debate between bootstrapping and seeking venture capital, and the necessity of sales teams in DevTools: A RedMonk Conversation: Fear is the Startup Killer: Jack Bridger on Founders, Differentiation, & DevTools
David Mytton, CEO of Arcjet, chats security and developer experience with James Governor. They discuss the importance of integrating security as a feature in developer workflows, the challenges developers face with traditional security tools, and the need for innovation in this space: A RedMonk Conversation: David Mytton on Arcjet’s Vision for Developer Security
Java turned 30 this year, and we’re celebrating. In this RedMonk conversation, Sharat Chander, Senior Director of Java Product Management & Developer Engagement at Oracle, stopped by to discuss this milestone with Kate Holterhoff: A RedMonk Conversation: Java at 30 with Sharat Chander
Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
AWS re:Invent: 1 - 5 December 2025, Las Vegas, NV
Events we'll be hosting:
Save the date for Monkigras: March 19-20, 2026 in London! If you’re interested in sponsoring the event, please contact Morgan Harris.
Our mailing address is:
RedMonk
411 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101
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