A few years back, when the public cloud started to gain traction, the main emphasis was on the core infrastructure blocks covering Compute, Storage, Networking, Databases, and so on. However, as various cloud providers started to introduce newer services, that trend changed rapidly as the services were more higher level and abstracted the underlying infrastructure aspects greatly. As an example, we have seen services like Amazon Connect, which is a cloud-based contact center offering from AWS, and the end user doesn't have to bother about the underlying infrastructure at all and can quickly get started in a matter of minutes, focusing on their core business aspects, call routing logic, and so on.
Another aspect from an application deployment perspective we have seen is that rather than using native virtualized cloud-based instances, developers are moving towards container-based deployments or even serverless approaches using services like AWS Lambda. These techniques further abstract the user from the underlying infrastructure and let them focus on core application and business logic. In fact, this trend is not just visible in the compute layer, but even the databases (like Amazon's serverless Aurora), messaging (Amazon SQS), analytics (Amazon Athena), and so on.
As a result of the aforementioned shift, we will continue to see application deployment models change, which will be less dependent on the infrastructure specifications, as that will be automatically handled by the services itself. Another side effect of such changes will be that lines between the typical Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS), and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) aspects will continue to be blurry and everything will become cloud or cloud native, to be more accurate. We are already seeing some variations of this, even currently, where new terms like Functions-as-a-Service (FaaS) or Anything-as-a-Service (XaaS) are being used in multiple contexts.
Future trend #2
Cloud services will be more application and software oriented by changing the deployment models to be agnostic to underlying infrastructure. Also, lines between IaaS/PaaS/SaaS will become even more blurry with a greater number of cloud native services being introduced.