Emerging technologies you should keep up with this year

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With big changes to the way teams operate and modernise, developers are going to play a key role in imagining what’s possible, accelerating recovery and pushing for innovation with emerging technologies.

To prepare for that role, developers will want to level up their skills on these areas. Here are a selection of emerging technologies that we believe you should be looking into today.

 

IoT

The Azure Internet of Things (IoT) is a collection of Microsoft-managed cloud services that connect, monitor, and control billions of IoT assets. An IoT solution is made up of one or more IoT devices that communicate with one or more back-end services hosted in the cloud. While IoT has been in the spotlight as an emerging technology for years, the dev scene is still new use cases and best practices.

With Azure IoT Hub, you can enable highly secure and reliable communication between your IoT application and the devices it manages. It’s a cloud-hosted solution back-end to connect any device virtually.

Azure IoT Hub also has built-in device management and provisioning to connect and manage IoT devices at scale, as well as compatibility with Azure IoT Edge and Azure Stack for building hybrid IoT apps.

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5G and Azure Edge Zone

Azure Edge Zone is a family of offerings from Microsoft Azure that enables data processing close to the user. You can deploy VMs, containers, and other selected Azure services into Edge Zones to address the low latency and high throughput requirements of applications.

It can be used for real-time analytics and inferencing via artificial intelligence and machine learning, media streaming and content delivery, surveillance and security, among many other applications.

5G opens up new possibilities using enhanced mobile connectivity that’s up to 10x faster, with reliable low-latency communication and very high device density. With Azure Edge Zones, you can connect your Azure services directly to 5G networks in the carrier’s datacentre.

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Blockchain

Blockchain is a record-keeping and contract-enforcement technology that’s based on complex cryptography. It allows organisations to streamline shared workstreams by exchanging and tracking assets and transactions on a shared ledger (often called distributed ledger technology, or DLT).

Azure Blockchain Service is a fully managed ledger service that gives users the ability to grow and operate blockchain networks at scale in Azure. It simplifies the formation, management and governance of consortium blockchain networks so you can instead focus on business logic and app development.

By providing unified control for both infrastructure management as well as blockchain network governance, Azure Blockchain Service provides simple network deployment and operations, built-in consortium management and the ability to develop smart contracts with familiar development tools. It’s an emerging technology that, despite being a fairly common talking point, continues to have massive potential.

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Blazor

Blazor is a web framework that allows you to write client-side web apps using C# all made possible by WebAssembly. These apps are passed to the browser where they are able to run at near-native speed, opening up new opportunities for languages like C# to run client-side in the browser.

One major benefit for Blazor apps is that they can use existing .NET libraries, thanks to the .NET Standard – a formal specification of .NET APIs that are common across all .NET implementations.

Best of all, Blazor is open-source. It’s part of the .NET platform that has a strong community of contributors from more than 3,700 companies.

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Kubernetes

Modern applications are increasingly built using containers, which are microservices packaged with their dependencies and configurations. Kubernetes is an emerging, open-source software for deploying and managing those containers at scale, and as such it continues to be at the top of many developer conversations.

Keeping containerised apps up and running can be complex because they often involve many containers deployed across different machines. Kubernetes provides a way to schedule and deploy those containers – plus scale them to your desired state and manage their lifecycles. Use Kubernetes to implement your container-based applications in a portable, scalable, and extensible way.

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LiveOps

If you work in game development, you need to understand your players, meet their individual needs, and cultivate long-term relationships to grow a healthy community. LiveOps helps you shorten the feedback loop between development and player satisfaction, producing a higher return on investment and helping your game last longer.

There are many different applications of LiveOps, from running updates without the need to patch software, to gathering statistics and player data. It also allows for game design experimentation, giving you the possibility of segmenting parts of the player base to test features and events to better improve game flow.

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