5 Cloud Computing Trends To Watch in 2020

Since its early inception, cloud computing has made a major shift from a simple business resource to a necessity. Today, many enterprises and SMBs are using cloud computing infrastructure to power their daily business operations; and development and research teams use cloud-based resources to power their innovations.

However, cloud computing is much more than an infrastructure resource. In a digital-first economy, which is oriented and motivated to provide better remote services, cloud computing plays a critical role. This article reviews five trends expected to take the center stage during 2020.

1. Cloud-Native Technologies

According to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) cloud-native refers to technologies that “empower organizations to build and run scalable applications in modern, dynamic environments such as public, private, and hybrid clouds”.

This empowerment has allowed cloud-native technologies to thrive in 2020, particularly in light of the restrictions on more traditional industries due to COVID-19 restrictions. These technologies have enabled businesses to operate almost without interruption despite massive migrations to remote working environments.

Some particularly beneficial technologies that continue to evolve include:

• Microservices —containerized services, like Kubernetes, allow the creation of loosely coupled applications. These services enable the scalability and flexibility of modern applications and software as a service (SaaS). Microservices enable the rapid development of software and allow development teams to rapidly shift to meet changing service and functionality demands. As containerization becomes more popular, organizations should make more efforts to secure Kubernetes workloads.
• Infrastructure as Code(IaC) —enables you to provision and manage infrastructure resources through pipelines. This enables automated, standardized deployments on a massive scale with minimal human resources. The ability to integrate infrastructure management with existing DevOps processes increases team productivity and allows dynamic flexibility.
• Serverless computing —outsources infrastructure provisioning, configuration, and management to a cloud provider and allows developers to focus only on front-end development. By abstracting away back-end development, teams can deploy applications faster, more flexibly, and with easy scaling. Serverless has made the upfront barriers of commercial development lower, allowing smaller teams to build and deploy software that can compete with traditional teams.

2. Omni-Cloud Instead of Multi-Cloud

As migration to the cloud becomes the default for many organizations, some are finding that existing migration strategies aren’t meeting their needs. Many teams have expanded beyond simple single cloud migrations into hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures but these have faults as well.

Although these options allow the flexibility and service optimization that organizations need, these architectures often require proprietary components. This makes environments difficult to manage and reduces the portability of workloads and applications.

As a result, some are trying to push the cloud computing industry towards an omni-cloud approach. In this approach, architecture is homogeneous with standardized connectivity between platforms and collaborative development and support between cloud vendors. As omni-cloud grows in popularity, niche vendors and hyperscalers will grow in availability and the format of cloud computing may drastically change.

3. Cloud-Based Quantum Computing

Quantum computing is still in its infancy but has the potential to completely change how computers are used. This technology enables computing hardware to be condensed on an incredible scale. It also offers computing speeds that far surpass what is currently available from even the largest supercomputers. When accessed through the cloud, quantum computing can provide these capabilities to teams that would never otherwise have access.

Combined, these traits have powerful implications for several disciplines. In particular, the following technologies can benefit:

• Cryptography —used to secure data, systems, and access to assets. Cryptography is vital to maintaining security and privacy in the digital world. With quantum computing the complexity of cryptography algorithms can be created and used is exponentially higher than what is currently possible. However, it would also make it possible to much more easily break existing encryptions. When quantum computing becomes accessible, cryptography will have to completely change to ensure that data remains secure.
• Data analytics and machine learning —big data analytics and machine learning are limited in scale by compute and storage capabilities, not available data. With access to the processing power and speeds offered by quantum computing these technologies can advance far beyond current limitations. For example, topological analyses are impractical at best with standard computing. But with quantum computing these analyses can be used to clean datasets, improving dataset and model quality and training speed.

4. Mobile Cloud Computing

A significant portion of digital interactions now happens on mobile devices. However, mobile networks do not have the power, flexibility, or often security of cloud networks. To address these deficits and provide wider support for mobile applications, mobile cloud computing (MCC) was developed.

MCC combines technologies used in mobile and cloud computing with wireless networks. This enables engineers to build, host, and operate mobile application processes in the cloud without forcing them to abandon existing systems. As MCC evolves, it will become a more reliable and performant way to deliver mobile content to users.

In particular, MCC can be leveraged to increase:

• Flexibility —increases users’ ability to store and retrieve data from any location. While this is available already when users are connected to a wi-fi connection, MCC can help extend this to mobile networks without sacrificing speeds. For example, through the inclusion of 5G.
• Multiple platform support —cloud computing is not restricted by platform in the way device computing is. This simplifies development and enables vendors to support a wider variety of users regardless of device.

5. Edge Computing

Edge computing moves computational work as close to a data source as possible. This is done to reduce bandwidth use and latency of processes. Edge technologies have the potential to speed up services, significantly reduce costs, and increase security. This is because edge services can potentially run on client resources rather than vendor resources. This localization means fewer data transfers, fewer opportunities for interception of requests, and fewer computational resources needed on the vendor end

In particular, edge computing technologies can have a big impact on the availability and functionality of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. These devices are currently limited in scope due to response latency and limited local resources. With edge technologies, these limitations are reduced and devices can begin to operate in real-time and at scale. This is huge when you consider that predictions place devices at over 21.5 billion by 2025.

Conclusion

Cloud computing is continually providing cutting edge resources, packed as dedicated services, end-to-end offering, configurable resources, and fully-managed solutions. As technology paradigms continue to evolve into new and essential fields, cloud vendors will continue to provide remote resources.

If 2019 saw a boom in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and containerization, 2020 is expected to see more development in cloud-native technologies, omni-cloud solutions, mobile cloud computing, edge computing, and the long-anticipated cloud-based quantum computing.