Traditionally, applications have been designed for either server-based environments or mobile devices. However, off late, that's changing a bit, where now code and applications are also being written for "things". These things could be any physical device, like your light bulb, thermostat, child's toy, or an actual car, which is connected to the internet and controlled that way. As per this article from Gartner (https://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3598917), an estimated 20.4 billion such devices will be connected to the internet by 2020, thereby greatly changing the way we interact with them. In fact, with so many devices connected to the backend, the application architectures and the amount of data that's transmitted and consumed will greatly change. Again, this wouldn't be possible without the cloud as this will require scalable stream-based data processing techniques, and services like AWS IoT and Amazon Kinesis will become central to implementations. Apart from that, many devices can't also be connected to the internet all the time, as they are in remote locations which have limited internet connectivity (like sensors in oil rigs), so for those scenarios, even edge computing will be pretty critical. These kinds of use cases will be supported by services like AWS Greengrass, which lets you run local compute, messaging, and data caching for connected devices in a secure way. For smaller devices like micro-controllers, which again need to support such edge computing scenarios, new kernel services like Amazon FreeRTOS will be pretty critical and enable those deployments.
As the data from these edge devices will be ingested in the cloud, there will be the possibility to perform real-time, batch, or even trend analytics, which will again continue to open new avenues and evolve the architectural patterns.
Future trend #6
Cloud native applications will have an end-to-end impact, right from the edge to the backend applications to the customer facing portals, thereby changing the way applications are created and deployed.