The Trend of De-globalization in the Software Engineering Field

This article explores how geopolitical shifts are driving software engineering from "globalization" toward "deglobalization." Over the past two decades, US-China technological collaboration enabled applications to adopt global architectures, leveraging distributed systems and the eventual consistency model from the CAP theorem to deliver low-cost, low-latency global services. However, since 2020, an international trust crisis has led customers to move away from reliance on public clouds or internet connectivity, demanding instead stable services within fully physically isolated "air-gapped" environments. This shift implies that software is no longer merely delivered as a SaaS subscription or via physical media, but must accommodate maintenance needs in private clouds, on-premises deployments, or even within isolated organizational structures. In the future, a key challenge in software engineering will be tolerating complete network isolation; the core of sales may shift from code to organizational structures with full operational capabilities, to address an increasingly fragmented and distrustful global market landscape.