Timeline - 2015-19
2015β
π’ By 2013, Prometheus was introduced for production monitoring at SoundCloud. The official public announcement was made in January 2015.
π Project Jupyter is a project to develop open-source software, open standards, and services for interactive computing across multiple programming languages, spun off from IPython in 2014 by Fernando PΓ©rez and Brian Granger, and formally established in February 2015.
π§ Keras is an open-source software library that provides a Python interface for artificial neural networks and acts as an interface for the TensorFlow library, with initial release on March 27, 2015.
π₯οΈ On April 8, 2015, GitHub announced Git Large File Storage (Git LFS), which allows users to store and work with large binary files in Git.
π₯οΈ Visual Studio Code, a source-code editor developed by Microsoft for Windows, Linux, and macOS, was first announced on April 29, 2015, at the Build conference, with a preview build released shortly after.
βοΈ In April 2015, Debian 8.0 (Jessie) was released with systemd as the default init system. On the same month, Ubuntu 15.04 was also released, officially switching to systemd.
π Discord was publicly released on May 13, 2015, as a platform designed specifically for the gaming community to communicate while playing together.
π The first stable release, Rust 1.0, was announced on May 15, 2015.
π The 6th edition, ECMAScript 6 (ES6) and later renamed to ECMAScript 2015, was finalized in June 2015, adding significant new syntax for writing complex applications including class declarations and ES6 modules. ES6 supports "arrow function" syntax, where a => symbol separates the anonymous function's parameter list from the body.
βοΈ The Open Container Initiative (OCI) was launched at DockerCon on June 22, 2015, by Docker, CoreOS, and other industry leaders under the Linux Foundation to design open standards for operating-system-level virtualization. OCI develops runc, a container runtime that implements their specification and serves as a basis for other higher-level tools. runc was first released in July 2015 as version 0.0.1.
π’ Kubernetes 1.0 was released on July 21, 2015. Google worked with the Linux Foundation to form the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and offer Kubernetes as a seed technology.
βοΈ Windows 10, released on July 29, 2015, introduced the "Windows as a Service" model with continuous updates, restored the Start menu after the tile-based experiment of Windows 8, and integrated the Microsoft Edge browser and the Cortana virtual assistant.
π Go 1.5 was released on August 19, 2015. This was a landmark release in which the entire compiler and runtime toolchain was rewritten from C into Go, making the language self-hosting.
π Phoenix v1.0 was released on September 1, 2015, providing a productive and reliable web framework that became a cornerstone of the Elixir ecosystem.
π The FIDO2 Project is a joint effort between the FIDO Alliance and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) whose goal is to create strong authentication for the web. At its core, FIDO2 consists of the W3C Web Authentication (WebAuthn) standard and the FIDO Client to Authenticator Protocol 2 (CTAP2), with the FIDO 2.0 Proposed Standard released on September 4, 2015.
π’ On September 14, 2015, Let's Encrypt issued its first certificate, which was for the domain helloworld.letsencrypt.org. On the same day, ISRG submitted its root program applications to Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Apple.
π’ In September 2015, Node.js v0.12 and io.js v3.3 were merged back together into Node v4.0.
π Vue.js is an open-source modelβviewβviewmodel front end JavaScript framework for building user interfaces and single-page applications, created by Evan You. The first source code commit to the project was dated July 2013, and Vue was first released in February 2014, with Vue.js 1.0 released on October 27, 2015.
βοΈ The Serverless Framework is a free and open-source web framework written using Node.js and the first framework developed for building applications on AWS Lambda. Developed by Austen Collins and maintained by a full-time team, it was initially released in October 2015.
π§ TensorFlow is a free and open-source software library for machine learning and artificial intelligence usable across a range of tasks but with a particular focus on training and inference of deep neural networks, with initial release on November 9, 2015.
π’ On November 18, 2015, the source of Visual Studio Code was released under the MIT License, and made available on GitHub.
π’ On November 18, 2015, Microsoft announced that Visual Studio Online was rebranded as "Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS)".
π Python added support for async/await with version 3.5 in 2015.
π TypeScript added support for async/await with version 1.7 in 2015.
π’ The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a Linux Foundation project that was founded in 2015 to help advance container technology and align the tech industry around its evolution.
π HTTP/2, published in 2015, provides a more efficient expression of HTTP's semantics "on the wire".
2016β
βοΈ In February 2016 Helm package manager for Kubernetes was released.
βοΈ Google Cloud Functions, a serverless execution environment, became available in Alpha in February 2016.
βοΈ Azure IoT Hub reached general availability on February 4, 2016, providing a central message hub for bi-directional communication between IoT applications and devices.
βοΈ Kubernetes 1.2, released in March 2016, introduced Deployments and support for clusters with up to 1,000 nodes.
π₯οΈ Visual Studio Code graduated from its public preview stage and reached version 1.0 on April 14, 2016, at which point it had over 1,000 extensions and half a million active users.
π The General Data Protection Regulation, abbreviated GDPR, or French RGPD is a European Union regulation on information privacy in the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). The European Parliament and Council of the European Union adopted the GDPR on 14 April 2016, to become effective on 25 May 2018.
βοΈ On April 20, 2016, Jenkins version 2 was released with the Pipeline plugin enabled by default. The plugin allows for writing build instructions using a domain specific language based on Apache Groovy.
βοΈ Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel and the systemd init system. The first snapd 2.12 is released into Ubuntu 16.04 (xenial-updates) and Fedora 24.
π Web Authentication (WebAuthn) is a web standard published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). WebAuthn is a core component of the FIDO2 Project under the guidance of the FIDO Alliance. First published: 31 May 2016
π’ In May 2016, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation accepted Prometheus as its second incubated project, after Kubernetes.
π ASP.NET Core is a free and open-source web framework and successor to ASP.NET, developed by Microsoft, with initial release on June 7, 2016.
π Yarn is a software packaging system developed in 2016 by Facebook for the Node.js JavaScript runtime environment, with initial release on June 18, 2016.
π .NET Core 1.0 was released on June 27, 2016, along with Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 Update 3, which enables .NET Core development.
π₯οΈ The Language Server Protocol (LSP) is an open, JSON-RPC-based protocol for use between source code editors or integrated development environments (IDEs) and servers that provide programming language-specific features, originally developed for Microsoft Visual Studio Code and now an open standard. On June 27, 2016, Microsoft announced a collaboration with Red Hat and Codenvy to standardize the protocol's specification.
π₯οΈ The VS Code Go extension provides rich language support for the Go programming language, with initial release in July 2016.
βοΈ Prometheus 1.0 was released in July 2016. Subsequent versions were released through 2016 and 2017, leading to Prometheus 2.0 in November 2017.
βοΈ Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a compatibility layer for running Linux binary executables (in ELF format) natively on Windows. WSL beta was introduced in Windows 10 version 1607 (Anniversary Update) on August 2, 2016. Only Ubuntu (with Bash as the default shell) was supported.
π₯οΈ Microsoft announced that PowerShell was becoming open-source (under the MIT License) and cross-platform on August 18, 2016, with alpha versions released for Linux and macOS.
βοΈ macOS 10.12 Sierra was released on September 20, 2016. Apple renamed the operating system from "OS X" to "macOS" to align with the branding of its other operating systems (iOS, watchOS, tvOS). It also introduced Siri on the Mac for the first time.
βοΈ Cilium 0.1, a cloud-native project that leverages eBPF to provide high-performance networking, security, and observability for containerized workloads, was released in September 2016.
π Angular is a TypeScript-based free and open-source web application framework led by the Angular Team at Google and by a community of individuals and corporations. Angular 2.0 was announced at the ng-Europe conference on October 22β23, 2014, with drastic changes in the 2.0 version creating considerable controversy among developers. Version 2.0 was released on September 14, 2016.
π§ PyTorch is a machine learning framework based on the Torch library used for applications such as computer vision and natural language processing, originally developed by Meta AI and now part of the Linux Foundation umbrella, with initial release in September 2016.
π’ Google Apps was officially rebranded as G Suite on September 29, 2016, to emphasize the collaborative and intelligent nature of its cloud-based productivity tools
π Next.js is an open-source web development framework created by Vercel enabling React-based web applications with server-side rendering and generating static websites, with initial release on October 25, 2016.
π Nuxt.js is a free and open source JavaScript library based on Vue.js, Node.js, Webpack and Babel.js, inspired by Next.js, which is a framework of similar purpose based on React.js, with initial release on October 26, 2016.
π HTML 5.1 was published as a W3C Recommendation in November 2016, adding features such as the <picture> element for responsive images, the <details> and <summary> elements, and the inputmode attribute.
π’ On November 15, 2016, Microsoft announced the general availability of Azure Functions.
π’ Hugging Face, Inc. is an American company based in New York City that develops computation tools for building applications using machine learning. The company was founded in 2016, originally as a company that developed a chatbot app targeted at teenagers. The Hugging Face Hub is a platform serving as a centralized web service for hosting.
2017β
π ISO published PDF 2.0 as ISO 32000-2 in 2017, the first version of the PDF specification developed entirely by ISO without Adobe proprietary extensions, introducing new features such as improved digital signatures, associated files, and better support for geospatial data.
π k6 was open-sourced by Load Impact in February 2017 as a modern load testing tool written in Go with JavaScript scripting, designed for developer workflows and CI/CD integration. Load Impact was subsequently rebranded as k6 in 2020 and acquired by Grafana Labs in 2021.
π WebAssembly (sometimes abbreviated Wasm) defines a portable binary-code format and a corresponding text format for executable programs. Announced in 2015 and first released in March 2017.
π’ Google acquired Kaggle, the world's largest community of data scientists and machine learning practitioners, in March 2017.
π WebAssembly System Interface (WASI) is a simple interface (ABI and API) designed by Mozilla intended to be portable to any platform. It provides POSIX-like features like file I/O constrained by capability-based security.
π§ DVC is a free and open-source, platform-agnostic version system for data, machine learning models, and experiments, designed to make ML models shareable, experiments reproducible, and to track versions of models, data, and pipelines, with initial release on May 4, 2017.
βοΈ Google Cloud IoT Core was launched in Beta in May 2017 for connecting and managing IoT devices.
π The WannaCry ransomware attack was a worldwide cyberattack in May 2017 by the WannaCry ransomware cryptoworm, which targeted computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system by encrypting data and demanding ransom payments in the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.
π Azure Cosmos DB, a globally distributed multi-model database service, reached general availability on May 10, 2017.
βοΈ Kubernetes 1.6 was released in March 2017, introducing Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and making etcd v3 the default storage backend.
βοΈ Kubernetes 1.7, released in June 2017, introduced Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs) as a replacement for Third Party Resources (TPRs).
π’ The "Microsoft 365" brand was first introduced on July 10, 2017, at Microsoft Inspire as an enterprise subscription product that bundled Office 365 with Windows 10 Enterprise licenses and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS)
π In July 2017, Adobe announced its intention to discontinue Flash Player entirely β including security updates β by the end of 2020, prompting all major browsers and platforms to finalize their removal plans.
βοΈ OCI v1.0 was officially released on July 19, 2017, marking the stabilization of the Runtime and Image Specifications. runc 1.0, the reference implementation of the OCI Runtime Specification, was released on the same day.
π Apache Iceberg is an open-source high-performance format for huge analytic tables that enables the use of SQL tables for big data while making it possible for engines like Spark, Trino, Flink, Presto, Hive, Impala, StarRocks, Doris, and Pig to safely work with the same tables at the same time, with initial release on August 10, 2017.
π Java 9 was released on September 21, 2017, officially deprecating the Java Applet API (java.applet package), signaling the formal end of applet support within the Java platform.
π Cypress announced it was going open source on May 4, 2017, and entered public beta on October 10, 2017. It was restructured into a single monorepo and made available as a Node.js module installable via npm, ending three years of private development.
βοΈ WSL was no longer beta in Windows 10 version 1709 (Fall Creators Update), released on October 17, 2017. Multiple Linux distributions could be installed and were available for install in the Windows Store.
βοΈ Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) was released on 19 October 2017, marking the first release to use the GNOME Shell interface and replace the X11 windowing system with the Wayland display server by default. This change occurred after nearly 6.5 years of using Unity as the default desktop.
π’ At the end of October 2017 Microsoft announced a preview of AKS (Azure Container Service), a managed Kubernetes service in Azure.
βοΈ Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) became certified by the CNCF in November 2017, ensuring compatibility with the broader ecosystem.
βοΈ On November 6, 2017, Amazon announced the new C5 family of instances that were based on a custom architecture around the KVM hypervisor, called Nitro.
π§ Amazon SageMaker is a cloud machine-learning platform that enables developers to create, train, and deploy machine-learning (ML) models in the cloud and also enables developers to deploy ML models on embedded systems and edge-devices. It was launched on November 29, 2017.
π’ Databricks grew out of the AMPLab project at University of California, Berkeley that was involved in making Apache Spark, an open-source distributed computing framework built atop Scala. In November 2017, the company was announced as a first-party service on Microsoft Azure via integration Azure Databricks.
π HTML 5.2 was published as a W3C Recommendation in December 2017, adding support for the <dialog> element and the Payment Request API, while removing obsolete features.
π Javascript added support for async/await in 2017 as part of ECMAScript 2017 JavaScript edition.
π§ A transformer is a deep learning model that adopts the mechanism of self-attention, differentially weighting the significance of each part of the input data. It is used primarily in the fields of natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV). Transformers were introduced in 2017 by a team at Google Brain and are increasingly becoming the model of choice for NLP problems, replacing RNN models such as long short-term memory (LSTM).
βοΈ Kata Containers, an open-source project providing lightweight virtual machines that feel and perform like containers, was announced on December 5, 2017. It was formed as a merger of Intel Clear Containers and Hyper.sh runV.
π Uvicorn, a lightning-fast ASGI (Asynchronous Server Gateway Interface) server implementation for Python, was created by Tom Christie and first released in late 2017.
π Puppeteer was open-sourced by Google's Chrome DevTools team in 2017 as a Node.js library providing a high-level API over the Chrome DevTools Protocol (CDP) to control headless Chrome and Chromium. Puppeteer 1.0 was released in January 2018 and became the dominant tool for headless browser automation in the JavaScript ecosystem, later inspiring the creation of Playwright.
2018β
π₯οΈ PowerShell Core 6.0 reached General Availability on January 10, 2018; built on .NET Core, it was the first version of the shell designed for cross-platform use on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
βοΈ On January 15, 2018, AWS announced Go as a supported language for AWS Lambda
π Meltdown is one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (the other being Spectre). Meltdown affects Intel x86 microprocessors, IBM POWER processors, and some ARM-based microprocessors. It allows a rogue process to read all memory, even when it is not authorized to do so. Date discovered: January 2018
π Spectre refers to one of the two original transient execution CPU vulnerabilities (the other being Meltdown), which involve microarchitectural timing side-channel attacks. These affect modern microprocessors that perform branch prediction and other forms of speculation. Date discovered: January 2018
βοΈ OpenSSH-based client and server programs have been included in Windows 10 since version 1803 (April 2018 Update)
π₯οΈ Python extension for Visual Studio Code is a Visual Studio Code extension with rich support for the Python language, with initial release on February 2, 2018.
π Nest (NestJS) is a framework for building efficient, scalable Node.js server-side applications, with initial release on GitHub on February 16, 2018.
π§ Cloud TPUs (Tensor Processing Units) became available in Beta in February 2018, offering hardware acceleration for machine learning.
π Deno is a runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly based on the V8 JavaScript engine and the Rust programming language, co-created by Ryan Dahl, who also created Node.js, with initial release on May 13, 2018.
π The W3C published the WebDriver specification as a Recommendation on May 31, 2018, standardising the browser automation protocol that originated in Selenium. Implementations are supported by Google (Chrome), Mozilla (Firefox), and Apple (Safari).
π Hypercorn, a high-performance ASGI and WSGI web server with support for HTTP/1, HTTP/2, and HTTP/3, was first released as open source on June 2, 2018.
π’ In March 2018, Kubernetes became the first project to graduate from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), signaling its maturity and widespread adoption.
π’ On June 5, 2018, AWS Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) available in the US East (N. Virginia) and US West (Oregon) Regions.
π Ryan Dahl, the creator of Node.js, officially announced Deno during his talk "10 Things I Regret About Node.js" at JSConf EU in Berlin on June 6, 2018.
π’ On June 13, 2018, Microsoft announced the general availability of the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).
π’ Slack acquired the intellectual property of HipChat and Stride from Atlassian on July 26, 2018, subsequently migrating those users to the Slack platform.
π TLS 1.3 was defined in RFC 8446 in August 2018.
π Go 1.11 was released on August 24, 2018, introducing experimental support for modules, a new dependency management system that later became the standard way to manage Go project dependencies.
βοΈ On September 10, 2018, Microsoft announced another rebranding of VSTS, this time to "Azure DevOps Services".
βοΈ Podman was initially released in October 2018.
βοΈ Microsoft introduced the Windows Pseudo Console (ConPTY) in 2018 as part of the Windows 10 October 2018 Update, providing a standardized PTY-like interface for the Windows Console to better support terminal-oriented software like OpenSSH and WSL.
π’ In 2018, Microsoft acquired GitHub, the largest host for open source project infrastructure. The deal closed on October 26, 2018.
βοΈ On 29 Nov 2018, AWS announced Ruby as a supported language for AWS Lambda.
βοΈ Kubernetes 1.13, released in December 2018, saw the Container Storage Interface (CSI) and CoreDNS reach general availability.
π FastAPI is a modern, high-performance web framework for building APIs with Python, created by SebastiΓ‘n RamΓrez and first released as open source on December 24, 2018.
π₯οΈ Visual Studio Code reached the top spot in the Stack Overflow Developer Survey in 2018, becoming the most popular development environment among respondents.
2019β
βοΈ In January 2019, Linuxbrew was merged back into Homebrew, adding beta support for Linux and the Windows Subsystem for Linux to the Homebrew feature set.
π Trino is an open-source distributed SQL query engine designed to query large data sets distributed over one or more heterogeneous data sources. In January 2019, the original creators of Presto, Martin Traverso, Dain Sundstrom, and David Phillips, created a fork of the Presto project. They initially kept the name Presto and used the PrestoSQL web handle to distinguish it from the original PrestoDB project.
π§ Generative Pre-trained Transformer 2 (GPT-2) is an open-source artificial intelligence created by OpenAI in February 2019. GPT-2 translates text, answers questions, summarizes passages, and generates text output on a level that, while sometimes indistinguishable from that of humans, can become repetitive or nonsensical when generating long passages.
π₯οΈ The Visual Studio Code Remote Development extension pack, enabling developers to use a container, remote machine, or the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) as a full-featured development environment, was first announced on May 2, 2019.
βοΈ Microsoft announced WSL 2 on May 6, 2019, and it was shipped with Windows 10 version 2004.
π’ On 7 May 2019, Google announced that the Kotlin programming language is now its preferred language for Android app developers.
βοΈ At WWDC on June 3, 2019, Apple announced that the variant of iOS running on iPad would be rebranded as "iPadOS," signaling the company's intention to develop the iPad platform in a direction distinct from the iPhone.
π Tailwind CSS is an open-source CSS framework. Unlike other frameworks, like Bootstrap, it does not provide a series of predefined classes for elements such as buttons or tables. Instead, it creates a list of "utility" CSS classes that can be used to style each element by mixing and matching. Initial release: 13 May 2019
π₯οΈ cURL 7.66, released 11 September 2019, supports HTTP/3 (and thus QUIC).
βοΈ iPadOS 13.1 was released on September 24, 2019, as the first version of the newly branded iPad operating system, featuring an updated Home Screen with widgets, improved multitasking with Split View and Slide Over, desktop-class Safari browsing, and mouse and trackpad support.
π WebAssembly became a World Wide Web Consortium recommendation on 5 December 2019.
π’ In 2019, the JS Foundation and Node.js Foundation merged to form the OpenJS Foundation.
π Rust added support for async/await with version 1.39.0 in 2019.
π’ The 20th Anniversary Edition of The Pragmatic Programmer was released in 2019, introducing the "ETC" (Easier To Change) principle as the foundational meta-principle of software design, which asserts that the essence of all good design is making it easier to change.