Trade-war shortcuts and FBA are now part of the core platform of a typical cloud site, so there is no reason to expect them to go away. A third trend is that new tools keep coming onto the market and keep getting faster and cheaper. In the second quarter, GitHub started offering its own hosted database service for developers, which it says will let them manage and scale databases without dealing with the management and problems of installing a database. “In the past, if you wanted to deploy and scale a database, you needed at least some degree of Linux system administration skills. While you could do it yourself, it’s time-consuming,” said Max Saltonstall, GitHub’s director of product. “Now that it’s part of our hosted offering, GitHub Database lets users get up and running in under 30 minutes.” Saltonstall also mentioned the other GitHub offering of late, GitHub Actions, a workflow management service for both the Mac and Windows desktop, as one of his favorites at GitHub. “In the two-plus years I’ve been at GitHub, I’ve found GitHub Actions to be one of my favorites of all of GitHub’s products and features,” he said. “GitHub Actions are the perfect way to speed up your workflow on a Mac or Windows machine. With these actions, we’ve created a powerful, new, and easy way to compile code, build and test an application, and package and deploy binaries or other output.” A fourth trend was revealed by the GitHub Q2 report this week: “We released a host of tools in GitHub Actions that are easy to implement on top of the Actions platform, including GitHub Actions on AWS Cloud Shell, GitHub Actions on Microsoft PowerShell, and a Docker-based workflow,” the company says. A fifth trend is about automation and the ease and simplicity that GitHub is building into its operations and how developers use the service. In a blog post this week, GitHub’s Scott Mirer wrote: “We’re launching a new feature called GitHub Actions, which is designed to make it easy to automate your workflows on GitHub.” Mirer goes on to say that “Today, nearly 70 percent of GitHub actions are automatically triggered by our automated workflows. Imagine the efficiency you could gain if you could automatically trigger all of your workflows whenever there was a new release from your dependencies and build your codebase whenever someone committed code.” This week, GitHub also announced its new security practices for developers, which include the announcement of an update to its Terms of Service. Finally, as 2018 begins to wind down, here’s a look at three trends I expect to drive development in 2019. Trend No. 1: GitHub continues to take on AWS The AWS Cloud is the fastest-growing cloud market in the world. While public cloud computing is still nascent, big-name public cloud vendors like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google are all investing heavily and competing aggressively. In the meantime, there is an increasingly long list of companies and startups offering managed services, APIs, and/or tools to help you stand up your own cloud — you might call it the “hybrid cloud.” Many of these are focused on providing something known as the private cloud, which provides the same capabilities as an AWS Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) instance or Azure Virtual Machine. As enterprises continue to move to the public cloud — often in hybrid configurations in the first place — they are also gravitating to managed services that can help them migrate large, complicated workloads over the network. GitHub has responded to this challenge by offering these kinds of managed services via its own internal cloud, known as GitHub Actions. Now, it is taking these same services and deploying them on an even larger stage by making them available to a much wider audience via its GitHub Actions marketplace. This week, GitHub announced another new product to help you take your software to the cloud. “GitHub Actions for S3, the code-free way to store and manage your assets in the cloud, is the culmination of years of effort to create a truly developer-friendly workflow that makes it easy to write, edit, and debug your app in the cloud,” says GitHub’s Saltonstall. But it’s not the only one. “We built GitHub Actions for Actions (beta) in collaboration with AWS to help developers who use AWS make their code more efficient, with features like actions on AWS Cloud Shell, actions in buildpacks for continuous integration and automation, and built-in deployments of container-based workloads for more complex pipelines,” said the GitHub founder in a statement about the new service. This is another example of GitHub’s effort to put all of its tooling and services in one place. When you combine the ease of deployment and automation that GitHub offers, along with the ease of deployment and maintenance, it has the power to disrupt the cloud market. It’s important to note that GitHub is not alone in this effort, with Microsoft and Red Hat both making a big push to create managed, easy-to-use services. Trend No. 2: GitHub continues to invest in native desktop support GitHub’s success in 2018 has a lot to do with its native support for Windows, Mac, and Linux desktops. And as GitHub starts to build its managed services on AWS and more features into its Actions service, you should expect more native development on the Mac, which may lead to more native desktop applications as the number of developers building their applications increases. “Every year, we’re working to make Git even better for developers. Git makes your code simpler, makes the act of coding more consistent, and makes working together with others on the same code much easier,” GitHub says in its latest report. “When you’re part of GitHub and using GitHub for work, we take our commitment to ensuring that Git works for you seriously. Last year, we announced GitLens and released an extension for Visual Studio Code (VSCode) in June, followed by a GitHub Desktop app this year in September. We continue to develop tools to empower teams, improve documentation, and ensure you get what you need, when you need it.” While GitHub does not often talk about GitHub Desktop specifically, it is one of the most interesting features that GitHub offers for developing a larger and more engaged community. Trend No. 3: GitHub continues to build out its developer community GitHub’s user base is more than 4.8 million people strong, who have uploaded more than 26 billion files and created more than 8 billion pull requests in total. The company is a developer community for the new millennium, and with each successive user who signs up for the service and starts using it, it gathers more data. “For 2017, we conducted over 6 billion interviews with 1.4 million GitHub users to ask them about their work, interests, and challenges, as well as what kinds of features they wanted to see from us next,” says the company in its 2018 State of the Octoverse Report. “We used these interviews to refine our products and prioritize how we should focus our efforts. And, for 2018, we’re continuing to iterate on many of the things we learned in 2017, as well as building new features that our community has been asking for, and we’ve shared some of the things we’re building in this report. In the coming years, we’re going to continue to invest in expanding and improving our platform.” To better understand this trend, it helps to understand how GitHub came to dominate the developer community. Back in 2010, GitHub set out to build a better code review system, and it came up with GitHub Pull Requests. It’s not a perfect solution to every problem, but it has been