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The Software Architects' Newsletter
April 2025
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Welcome to the InfoQ Software Architects' Newsletter! We bring you essential news and experience on emerging patterns and technologies from industry peers each month.

This month, we focus on "AI Trends: Disrupting Software Tooling, Techniques, and Teams". Technologies, patterns, and practices from this topic span the entire "diffusion of innovation" graphs in our InfoQ Trends Reports 2024 eMag and our InfoQ AI, ML and Data Engineering Trends Report - September 2024 (and accompanying podcast).

There's no denying that LLMs have dominated the conversation around software engineering for the past year, but at InfoQ, we focus on the impact this is having within the enterprise and on real-world software delivery projects.

News

AI Continent: European Commission Outlines Strategy for Scaling AI Development

The European Commission has presented the AI Continent Action Plan, a new strategy aimed at strengthening the European Union's capacity for AI development and deployment. The plan outlines coordinated investment in infrastructure, access to high-quality data, AI adoption in strategic sectors, and support for regulatory implementation.

The plan includes establishing a strong computing infrastructure by creating at least 13 AI factories as regional hubs to support startups, research institutions, and industry players. Additionally, up to five AI gigafactories will be developed to provide extensive computing power for training large foundation models in Europe. These initiatives will be financially supported by the public and private sectors through the InvestAI facility, aiming to mobilize €20 billion.

Google Open-Sources Agent2Agent Protocol for Agentic Collaboration

Google released the Agent2Agent (A2A) Protocol, an open-source specification for building AI agents that can connect with other agents that support the protocol. Google has enlisted over 50 technology partners to contribute to A2A's development.

Google announced the release at the recent Google Cloud Next conference. A2A is billed as a "complement" to Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) and defines a client-server relationship between AI agents. Google developed the protocol with help from partners like Salesforce, Atlassian, and LangChain, aiming to create an interoperability standard for any agent, regardless of vendor or framework.

FastAPI-MCP: Simplifying the Integration of FastAPI with AI Agents

A new open-source library, FastAPI-MCP, is making it easier for developers to connect traditional FastAPI applications with modern AI agents through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). Designed for zero-configuration setup, FastAPI-MCP allows developers to automatically expose their API endpoints as MCP-compatible tools, effectively making web services accessible to AI systems with minimal modification.

QCon London: How to Design GenAI Interaction from the Company That Designed Apple's First Mouse

During her QCon London keynote, Savannah Kunovsky, managing director of emerging technologies at IDEO, discussed how design thinking can ensure that the products we build are technically and genuinely impactful. She also discussed how we can use Gen AI to help people stay more connected and adapt their interactions to meet users' needs.

Optimize AI Workloads: Google Cloud's Tips and Tricks

Google Cloud has announced a suite of new tools and features designed to help organizations reduce costs and improve the efficiency of AI workloads across their cloud infrastructure. The announcement comes as enterprises increasingly seek ways to optimize spending on AI initiatives while maintaining performance and scalability.

The new features focus on three key areas: compute resource optimization, specialized hardware acceleration, and intelligent workload scheduling. These improvements aim to address one of the primary challenges enterprises face when deploying AI at scale – balancing innovation with cost management.

Case Study

AI Trends Disrupting Software Teams

The software industry is undergoing its most significant transformation since the advent of cloud computing. AI is fundamentally changing how we build, operate, and interact with software. As someone who has observed and written about major recent industry shifts from SOA to microservices, and from containers to serverless, I see AI driving an even more profound change.

This isn't just about automating coding tasks or adding chatbots to applications. We're witnessing the emergence of new development paradigms, operational practices, and user interaction models that will reshape how teams are structured and software is consumed.

The full version of this article examines five trends that are already impacting software teams and will become increasingly influential in the years to come. For each trend, we'll explore what's changing, real-world examples, and discuss how different roles – from developers to architects to product managers – can adapt and thrive in this new landscape.

Your next steps should align with your role in software development:

  • For developers, hands-on experience with coding assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot is the bare minimum. Automating code reviews with tools such as CodeRabbit is another low-hanging fruit. Focus on integrating these tools into your daily workflow by identifying low-risk scenarios where they are effective. If these are not allowed by your employer, use them in your open-source work or side projects and explain to your colleagues the benefits and limitations.
  • Operations teams should explore how AI can automate more tasks and reduce the need for human intervention. Then prepare to operate AI-workloads, whether that is only a few calls to external LLMs, or running full agentic systems.
  • Architects should focus on understanding end-to-end LLM-powered architectures and how agentic systems fit into enterprise environments. This means going beyond individual AI components to understand how to design reliable, secure systems that leverage AI capabilities while maintaining enterprise-grade quality. The priority should be identifying strategic opportunities within the organization, whether modernizing legacy applications with AI capabilities or designing new AI-native systems from the ground up.
  • Technical writers must embrace AI tools as the new word editors. Experiment with many tools, models, and prompts, and focus on automating the writing workflow. The content in the future will be conversational.
  • Product managers must track AI trends and their potential impact on product strategy. Study AI-native products to understand how natural language interfaces and AI assistance can enhance user experience.

Designing, operating, and programming as we know it will continue to evolve, but building these foundational skills will prepare you for whatever comes next. Start now because this trend will be here for the next decade.

This content is an excerpt from a recent InfoQ article by Bilgin Ibryam, "AI Trends Disrupting Software Teams".

To get notifications when InfoQ publishes content on these topics, follow "AI, ML & Data Engineering", "Machine Learning", and "Large Language Models (LLMs)" on InfoQ.

Missed a newsletter? You can find all of the previous issues on InfoQ.

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Upcoming Events

QCon: For practitioners, by practitioners

InfoQ Dev Summit Boston 2025 (June 9-10): Schedule now live

Join senior developers for two days of talks focused on real-world challenges. Hear from senior engineers at Netflix, The New York Times, Shopify, MongoDB, CarGurus, and more. Topics include cloud infrastructure, data architectures, AI adoption, and resilient systems. Register before May 13 to save with early bird pricing. View the schedule & register.


InfoQ Dev Summit Munich 2025 (October 15-16): Practical insights for senior developers

InfoQ Dev Summit Munich offers two days of deeply technical talks with real-world lessons from teams building and running complex systems. No fluff, no hidden product pitches—just practical takeaways. Early bird pricing ends May 13. Explore the conference & register.


QCon San Francisco 2025 (November 17-21): Learn how early adopter teams are solving complex challenges

Join senior engineers, architects, and leaders for three days of talks (Nov 17–19) and two optional training days (Nov 20–21). Learn how top teams scale AI/ML, evolve architectures, boost developer productivity, and build secure, high-performing systems. Save before May 13 with early bird pricing. Preview the tracks & register.


QCon AI 2025 (December 16-17): AI-assisted software delivery—how real teams build faster at scale

QCon AI is for senior developers and architects using AI to speed up software delivery—beyond prototypes and hype. Learn how real teams code, test, deploy, and iterate faster while staying reliable and responsible. Join us in NYC for practical insights from those delivering AI at enterprise scale. Launch pricing ends May 13. Explore the conference & register.

About InfoQ

Senior software developers rely on the InfoQ community to keep ahead of the adoption curve. One of the main reasons software architects and engineers tell us they keep coming back to InfoQ is because they trust the information provided and selected by their peers.

We've been helping software development teams adopt new technologies and practices for over 19 years through InfoQ articles, news items, podcasts, tech talks, trends reports, and our software development conferences: QCon and InfoQ Dev Summit.

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