RedMonk October 2025 Update
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Hi Everyone,
Steve here. Earlier this month, RedMonk was delighted to host the 13th Monktoberfest here in Portland, Maine.
With the help of our staff, our sponsors and our speakers we did our best to put on an event worthy of our attendees and the time they take out of their schedules to be with us. We’ll leave it to them to judge how we did in that regard, but I wanted to take a minute to highlight two things that I think speak to the quality of people who attend the event.
The first thing is something that has happened every year we’ve held the event, and yet is something I will never take for granted. In the wake of this year’s Monktoberfest, I had conversation after conversation with the people who made the event possible - from the catering staff to our transcriptionist Norma to our friend Ryan, the savant who is responsible for our spirits menu - all of whom said essentially the same thing: what a nice, smart and great group it was. I have no idea how we’ve been fortunate enough to attract the community that attends this event, but it’s what makes all of the effort worth it.
And if there were any doubts about the quality of the attendees, the second thing will dispel them. This year, for the first time in the history of the program, we were unable to secure a single sponsor for our Diversity and Inclusion efforts which offer marginalized and underrepresented groups an opportunity to attend the Monktoberfest - an opportunity they might not be able to afford otherwise. This was not entirely a surprise. In the times we live in, diversity and inclusion efforts which were once viewed as important and necessary are increasingly viewed as potentially attracting the wrong kind of attention. As we told our attendees, however, if RedMonk could not find support from sponsors to carry the program forward, we would absorb those costs ourselves because we believe them to still be vitally important - even if they are politically unpopular. Which we assumed would conclude the matter.
Our attendees, on the other hand, thought otherwise. Two different attendees - who I won’t name here only because I don’t have their permission - self-organized a donation drive amongst the Monktoberfest attendees, and our Diversity and Inclusion program not only received cash donations but a four figure check that came strictly from the pockets of attendees who had already spent substantial money to be with us.
To be clear, we’ve always had evidence that our attendees are invested in the event. How many events, after all, have attendees help pack up and take down the event after it’s wrapped? But the degree to which people were willing to not only step up for the event itself, but to make sure that people who otherwise would not be able to attend had the opportunity to, was, candidly, inspiring.
To everyone who was with us then, or who helped make the event happen, or helped make the event possible, on behalf of RedMonk I thank you from the bottom of my heart.
Outside of the Monktoberfest, the monks have been all over the map recently. From Barcelona to Boston to Las Vegas to New York to Orlando - and next week it’ll be San Francisco - we’ve been busy. If you haven’t caught up with us in person yet, though, not to worry. We’ll have multiple monks (including RedMonk beers) at both KubeCon in Atlanta and re:Invent in [sigh] Las Vegas, so we’ll hope to catch up with you all there.
Links Roundup
“The difficulty here is that the concept of “fakeness” is a spectrum rather than a binary. (Like all categories we use to divide the world.) … But for now, Samsung’s Moon imagery sticks out, and I think this is because it’s a particularly convenient application for this sort of computational photography.”
Perhaps this will change the number of "CSS is not a language" arguments that happen every time we drop a Language Rankings update?
Recent RedMonk Research
While MongoDB's AMP doesn’t represent vertical integration between the database and the app platform in the direct sense, it’s absolutely a move towards database players taking more ownership of the application stack. RM clients mentioned: MongoDB, AWS, Crunchy Data, GitHub, IBM, and Oracle
AI tools have made it easier than ever to feed the snake. But until the rest of the system learns to digest as quickly as it swallows, speed gains stay stuck in the middle. RM clients mentioned: AWS and Google
Last month Oracle released Java 25. Several developers have used this release as an opportunity to share their enthusiasm around the JVM and Oracle’s stewardship. This strikes us as noteworthy, and in this RedMonk post Kate Holterhoff discusses why. RM client mentioned: Oracle
WebAssembly (Wasm) 3.0 dropped, and the developer community has some thoughts! In this post Kate discusses what developer sentiment around Wasm 3.0 can tell us about this project’s future. RM clients mentioned: Google, Cribl, Cloudflare, and Fastly
A piece from Steve O'Grady on Anthropic, IBM and the Future of the Enterprise AI Market. RM clients mentioned: Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft
Recent Videos and Media Appearances
In this RedMonk conversation, Pascal Martin, principal software engineer at Bedrock Streaming, and Valentin Clavreul, principal backend engineer at Bedrock Streaming, discuss the evolution of streaming architectures and their partnership with Fastly as a crucial element in optimizing performance: Bedrock Streaming: From CDN to compute for 50M+ people watching the Euros.
James Governor talks with Prashanth Shenoy, VP of Marketing for Broadcom’s VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF). They discuss the impact of VMware’s integration into Broadcom, including the shift from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, portfolio and ecosystem simplification, and the evolving role of cloud admins, platform engineers, and developers: A RedMonk Conversation: An update on VMware Cloud Foundation (with Prashanth Shenoy).
Kate Holterhoff discusses the sessions she was most excited about at IBM TechXchange 2025 in Orlando on topics including academic partnerships, quantum computing, public speaking, and IBM MQ: RedMonk Quick Take: IBM TechXchange 2025.
Exclusively on the MonkCast
In this MonkCast with the Monks episode, RedMonk analysts Kate Holterhoff, Rachel Stephens, and James Governor discuss the current 'grumpy era' of AI, where developers are questioning the ROI of AI tools and their effectiveness. They check in on AI code assistants, vibe coding, agentic IDEs, AI spec-driven development, and the AI Engineer.
Taylor Barnett-Torabi, Staff Product Manager at Netlify, and Lyle Schemmerling, Senior Software Engineer at FusionAuth, discuss the impact of large language models (LLMs) on developer experience with Kate Holterhoff. They chat about the evolution of agent experience (AX), the integration of LLMs into documentation, and the challenges of ensuring that documentation remains relevant and secure in a rapidly changing landscape: A RedMonk Conversation — “Good docs are still good docs”: AX, DX, & LLMs (with Taylor Barnett-Torabi & Lyle Schemmerling).
In this conversation, Rachel Stephens (Research Director at RedMonk) and Mike Milinkovich (Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation) discuss the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). Mike explains the law, its implications for the software industry – particularly open source software – and the responsibilities it places on manufacturers.
Austin Parker, Director of Open Source at Honeycomb and a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, chats AI, Olly, and OTel with Kate Holterhoff.
Meet the Monks
Events we'll be attending:
GitHub Universe 2025: 28 - 29 October 2025, San Francisco, CA
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2025: 10 - 13 November 2025, Atlanta, GA
AWS re:Invent: 1 - 5 December 2025, Las Vegas, NV
Events we'll be hosting:
RedMonk Beers: 11 November 2025, Atlanta, GA
Our mailing address is:
RedMonk
411 Congress Street
Portland, ME 04101
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