Technological advancements have always been the driving factors behind transformation within an industry. Cloud Computing is one such example that has fundamentally changed the way businesses function. And, more importantly, we have been witnessing several new technologies powered by cloud computing emerge over the past few years.

There have been significant advancements in the evolution and effective use of cloud technology. This has resulted in these technologies creating a major impact on the cloud computing environment and also are playing a key role in transforming the world of computing as a whole.

Here are 6 emerging technologies in the cloud computing zone:

1) Containers
Containers gained popularity in terms of adoption when the ‘speed of delivery and complexity’ rose to prominence within the IT industry. Dissimilar to traditional Virtual Machines (VM) that store the main OS, container technology can be considered to be a lightweight software packaging method, where a single container package contains a piece of the software along with its bare essentials (libraries and configuration files) to traverse across various computing environments.

2) Serverless
This addresses the problems the IT industry was suffering from in terms of critical hardware maintenance and software provisioning. Serverless computing provides the solution for such concerns by managing key maintenance and scaling demands of businesses, encouraging them to shift attention to other key aspects in their cloud-based systems.

Through serverless computing, the trend for pay-as-you-go models and pay-for-use computing models have addressed the majority of software burden concerns. This function-as-service model has transformed the cloud computing environment and made it run faster and more efficiently.

3) Microservices
Using single large applications has become a thing of the past. Componentization is the trend that allows for the simplification of software processes. This involves breaking larger applications into smaller modules or components to deliver faster solutions and is referred to as Microservices.

A microservice architecture separates large apps into small, joined services or modules. This modular approach facilitates easy delivery of multiple modules by different small teams, independent of the actual ‘bulk’ application. This results in the continuous delivery of fully updated software and ultimately increases the speed of the application delivery cycle.

4) DevOps
This is another key trend that has received a significant boost in the cloud computing environment. By bridging gaps, DevOps culture has brought together different teams with specialized skills in various areas, allowing them to collaborate towards a shared single goal.

The developers are responsible for creating codes while the operations teams work on the metrics. Together, they can perform wonders in a software environment providing businesses with a competitive edge. DevOps tools and resources, security integration such as DevSecOps and other similar applications make DevOps even more valuable for businesses.

5) Internet of Things (IoT)
Advancements in IoT have majorly influenced the technology trend. As a result of the adoption of IoT technology, we now have smart devices that have become fairly common such as fitness trackers in smartwatches, smart homes, self-driving cars etc. The processes within these applications involve vast volumes of data. How do we process this data? The simple answer for several businesses is through cloud computing.

Cloud-based data analytics platforms, powered by hyper-scaling servers, accommodate for effective data processing. Cloud systems also are an excellent solution to setting up IoT, which tends to be expensive and complex to build from scratch. Several cloud service providers address this issue by providing IoT solutions as a part of the overall services they offer.

6) Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence has now become the next-generation technology solution that is capable of providing a fresh perspective to the technological world. As most of its solutions use machine intelligence that is independent and doesn’t require human assistance, AI is proving to be a very popular option for businesses and is experiencing high market dominance among existing tools.

 However, developing AI applications is a complex process for many businesses. This is where cloud computing can play a crucial role. Companies developing such AI applications are turning to cloud service providers to leverage machine learning and other deep learning tools. Due to its wide computing and storage options, cloud-based AI is quickly becoming one of the most sought-after solutions for any business, regardless of their size, in realizing their AI efforts.

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