So many new cloud technologies are being developed all the time – how do you know which ones you need to keep on top of? Whether it’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), private cloud or public cloud services, these different types of cloud computing and cloud technologies have to be on your radar.
Over the last couple of years, organisations have replaced on-premise data centres with cloud infrastructure and data storage with cloud lake and warehousing solutions. Many are taking a hybrid or on-premise/cloud approach for the necessary security, user access, disaster recovery provision and particular use case. The public cloud companies have dominated – primarily Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Microsoft Azure but here are Five next-gen Cloud Technologies to service particular niches within the data domain.
1. DataOps
DevOps has significantly impacted the IT and software industry, increasing delivery cadence through automation and continuous integration and delivery. DataOps applies the same principles with added factors like collaboration, business input and the full data ‘supply chain’. DataOps tooling will emerge more and more over the coming months, and the platform from DataKitchen is the world’s first in the DataOps world. It taps into a holistic view of an organisation’s tooling, disparate teams and locations and allows the orchestration of complex data pipelines so data analytics is delivered iteratively, innovatively and quickly.
2. Niche Cloud Infrastructure
Reading this, you already know the dominant public cloud players, AWS, GCP and Microsoft Azure. Others have started to compete though the likes of Alibaba and IBM are hot on their heels. Another IaaS provider, DigitalOcean, simplifies cloud computing and builds it specifically with developers in mind. It seems scalability isn’t the only thing companies are now interested in; simplicity and price effectiveness make DigitalOcean an attractive alternative for cloud computing services.
3. Application-level
One of the main upcoming PaaS providers here, Heroku is a true Platform as a Service allowing developers to deploy, manage and scale their applications. Each PaaS has an eco-system of services to leverage in relation to connectivity, data storage and processing and more. Heroku’s offering is vast, so developers can extend their applications with fully managed services. Awesome!
4. Data Warehousing
Snowflake was built purposely for the cloud, making it an incredible Data Warehousing tech. Patented architecture designed for amassing data easily and enabling rapid analytics. It’s emerging as a formidable opponent to the main cloud computing services providers’ relational DataWarehouses like Amazon Redshift and Google BigQuery, not just with its performance but its price competitiveness and unique model where you can scale up storage and compute power separately.
5. Graph Database in the Cloud
Graph database technology has taken off over the past couple of years; its capability to handle connected data makes them attractive to companies with high data content. TigerGraph is now ‘in the cloud’ – meaning it’s the only scalable graph database currently available on the market; it’s been built with processing huge amounts of data in mind with a native parallel architecture meaning multiple processing requirements can run at the same time. Pretty cool, right?
The capabilities and different types of cloud computing are phenomenal. It makes technology selection exercises critical, and they must be aligned with the business goals/use cases. There is much more outside the world of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform; research is key because the evolution of cloud computing services will continue to strengthen.
This is a short list of exciting cloud technologies covering cloud infrastructure, IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and data storage; it indicates the strength of this exciting domain of IT. Cloud computing and cloud infrastructure must be a consideration for your business; the opportunity to increase computing power, lower operational IT costs and increase the speed and delivery of data and analytics in the business is not something you should overlook. Good luck navigating the exciting world of Cloud Technologies.
If you are looking for a career in cloud technologies, please get in touch with the specialist team at Agile Recruit. We have offices in both Manchester and Milton Keynes.
