IoT Cloud App Development Trends 2021: A Detailed Overview

IoT cloud app development is known for its capacities to enhance agility, productivity, and security. So what’s in store for 2021?

More focus on container technologies in IoT platforms

Gartner projects that over 75% of global organizations will be using containerized apps in production by 2022. So far, container technologies have been part of traditional enterprise IT environments and cloud architectures. Recent developments in industrial cloud IoT platforms and the increased demand for vendor-neutral IoT technologies, however, have made containers increasingly relevant for the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT Cloud App Development Trends 2021
Defining containers

What is a container? This is a lightweight virtualization technology that includes an entire runtime environment. This means an application and all its dependencies, plus the libraries and configuration files required to run the application. Container technologies help you abstract differences in operating systems and underlying infrastructures. This is why they are often embedded in IoT platforms so that you can connect to any IoT device and virtually make any machine or piece of legacy equipment IoT-ready. As the pace of changing and updating applications grows, container isolation becomes increasingly important. Since modules are fully independent and interact with one another only through well-defined APIs, they can be updated without affecting their environments.

Empowering AI processes at the edge

Containers also empower edge computing as they are becoming an indispensable part of AI-enabled processes at the edge. AI and machine learning models can be trained and deployed via isolated containers on edge devices. Also, the software deployed at the edge has to be regularly updated. So cloud IoT platforms have made it possible to manage and run containerized workloads from the cloud.

Enabling better security and app management

Partitioning functionalities between different containers make it possible to run individual updates that do not affect other applications. Also, this means that IoT cloud app development service users can assign different privileges to different containers, from an administrator to a read-only role. This enhances security and guarantees the integrity of assets.