In 2018, can cloud, big data, and AI stand more turmoil?

The amount of new technologies in 2017 has been overwhelming: The cloud was adopted faster than analysts projected and brought several new tools with it; AI was introduced into just about all areas of our lives; IoT and edge computing emerged; and a slew of cloud-native technologies came into fruition, such as Kubernetes, serverless, and cloud databases, to name a few. I covered some of these a year ago in my 2017 predictions and it's now time to analyze the trends and anticipate what will likely happen in the tech arena next year. While we love new tech, the average business owner, IT buyer, and software developer glaze over this massive innovation and don't know how to start turning it into business value. We will see several trends emerge in 2018, and their key focus will be on making new technology easy and consumable. Amazon and the other cloud providers are in a race to gain and maintain market share, so they keep on raising the level of abstraction and cross-service integration to improve developer productivity and strengthen customer lockins.