Cloud Computing trends that will rule in 2024

In 2021 it was forecasted that overall by cloud computing infrastructure cost will cross $1 Trillion by 2025 but with the evaluation of Generative AI and its fast adoption in to the daily life, it may turn out that the presumed $1 Trillion benchmark will be crossed by 2024 itself.

The driving factor for this will be platform-as-a-service and LLMs being provided in models-as-a-service with AWS Bedrock at the fore front.

With stiff markets in 2023 in 2024, businesses will be looking beyond time and money saving opportunities in cloud migration with GenAI adoption. Though security, data protection concerns are still holding the forefront but services like AWS Bedrock, Azure OpenAI — those concerns has a little safety net to it. Enterprises will continue to take hybrid cloud, federated cloud to overcome lot of these security barriers. At re:Invent AWS also announced GuradRail for AWS Bedrock to improve the security posture and to speed up the adoption of AI on cloud.

At re:Invent’2023 — AWS also announced services/offerings like Amazon Q — a GenAI powered assistant for design work, Availability of Graviton Processors for high computing, Trainium2 chips specifically designed to reduce time and cost of AI model trainings, Amazon Connect — AWS’s flagship cloud contact centre service is now powered by GenAI with Amazon Q and many more announcements that will improve the adoption of AI, GenAI and cloud computing.

In 2024, cloud will continue to boast and gain popularity with its significant investments in futuristic trends. Here’s how I see things will pan out in 2024.

1. ML at Edge: Edge computing is a paradigm in which information is processed as close as possible to the location where it’s collected like smart phones and smart devices etc. With growing popularity of Machine Learning — lots of providers like Apple and Google is rushing to provide the ML features in their devices like iPhones and Google Pixels. For example in recent pixel phone launch google has already launched lots of AI rich features. It’s in the news that Apple is planning to provide GenAI features on iPhones with iOS 18.

In 2024 its predicting heart related disease on Smart Watches like Apple Watch will gain further accuracy. With AWS Sagemaker Edge (SageMake Edge) it will gain popularity to have ML features on Edge for other smart device providers as well.

2. Models-As-A-Service: Cloud will have a huge role to play in gaining ML adoption. Specifically with the respect to Generative AI and adoption into enterprises. With Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Q the adoption rates will continue to sky rocket. Major businesses and enterprise will not have the data or computing powers to train the models themselves. With Models-As-A-Service it will be beneficial for all to pick up the adoption.

3. Multi Cloud: As more and more enterprises moving to cloud lot of the existing stack holders are moving to multi cloud strategies which offers cost effectiveness, storage efficiency and reduction in proprietorships. Though adoption of multi cloud/hybrid cloud is still complex but the adoption rate is growing for sure. AI and LLM models will definitely add more to this hybrid cloud adoption. Imagine you are using AWS and want to use OpenAI services you must either build your own LLM — which is practically impossible or you rely on other cloud providers who offers OpenAI services. With hybrid cloud the additional security advantages should also be taken into considerations since lot of enterprises will want to continue on-prem infra for their proprietary innovations or data.

4. Cloud driven IoT and Blockchain: As much as popularity of AI is growing the smart devices, usage of blockchain is also growing. With hyper scalers offering infrastructure, adoption of such solutions are cost effective because enterprises won’t need to invest in infrastructure or architecture. They can quickly adopt the fail fast mindset with AWS services like Quantum Ledger DB or Managed Blockchain or IoT GreenGrass the adoption for small and medium industries will be very fast in 2024.

5. Sustainability in Cloud: Almost all hyper scalers have pledged to be carbon natural not just for their own operations but also for their offered services. With such pledge it helps their customers to reduce the carbon footprints as well. AWS and Amazon has pledged to achieve zero emissions by 2040, and Microsoft aims to beat this by ten years. Along with Google, they have also all stated their intention to generate 100 percent of the energy used in their operations from renewable sources. Whether they will succussed in their attempts or not will be seen in time but the attempts itself will push the adoption under, go-green initiatives of various enterprises.

6. Low code/No-Code Cloud: AWS recently launched Party Rock service which is a Low Code/No-Code platform that can create any application in next to no time (obviously with proper instructions and details). Such services will help non-technical persons to build solutions on their own. Party Rock has the potential to skyrocket adoption of cloud with their drag and drop solutions and offerings. In 2024, it may prove to be a game changer.

7. Pay-As-You-Go Serverless Cloud: Hyper scalers had started the serverless model where customers does not have to worry about infrastructure’s ongoing costs. Customer will pay only for the usages and nothing beyond that. With such kind of payment structures enterprises/businesses pays for consumption. Serverless also eliminates the need of maintenance which also helps in cost savings for businesses. Serverless adoption will grow further in 2024 specially for small businesses where they want to leverage the cloud and also have cost optimisation.

Beyond the above points there are a lot of trends that I presume driving the cloud adoption but above are the key points that will surely be part of growth story on 2024.