Since the in house server days, technology solutions have only become more and more time consuming to implement, ID & PII obsessed, and bulky (data footprint-wise). I am thankful I remember much more simple times, when apps were tiny, run on regular computers in my office, and you could symply restore from a local backup to bring a service back online.
Now we have companies paying thousands of dollars a month to host a simple site or web app, because now it's all in the cloud, no matter the apps function, while hosting customers assume about 80-90 percent of responsibility for securing and maintaining their app anyway. Containerization is leveraged to add a "backdoor" for individual admins, but that only serves to protect infrastructure, it actually makes a customer's individual app open to vulnerability that same as running your own instance if you miss vital updates or if there is a breakdown in the supply chain. We need to stop listening to the companies that market tools and be honest with ourselves... Security needs a better model than just adding new tools and entry points to the app chain.
There's gotta be a point where you evaluate things and tell yourself that there has to be a better and more affordable way than tunneling through 5 VPNs just to push updates for 8 disparate JS and PHP libraries and 5 containers. App and library updates are also far too frequent in 2023 as well... Frameworks need to ship instances with less features, and modules should be reduced to only those used and deemed most essential, reducing footprint is a key aspect lost on technological advancement, it is also a firm indicator of increased efficiency for app and library devs if you ask me.
Now with zero trust, devs literally spend a lot of their daily workload logging back in and re-establishing VPN connections due to timeouts. There's got to be a point where we develop a far more simple IT solution to all of this mess. Security is still getting compromised regularly no matter what is done. The solution also won't likely involve Ai at this point in my opinion, as security and complexity are assuredly not resolved by leveraging current-state Ai tools.
It's also important to note this is why PHP is still going strong, it doesn't require compilation, and is relatively easier than most other langs on learning curve to implement.
I literally built my IT career on making things simpler, and in explaining complex IT issues in human language to non-technical people. There is a lot of room in my field for growth due to the rest of the industry's constant focus on jargon and over-complexity.
Simpler solutions, conveyed and implemented in human language, will be king in 2024.