On October 17th, eWEEK hosted its monthly #eWEEKChat to discuss the future of cloud computing. Moderated by James Maguire, eWEEK's Editor-in-Chief, the chat focused on current and evolving trends that are shaping the cloud platform and offered guidance to companies to maintain a competitive strategy. Participants discussed questions such as the impact of cloud computing on the enterprise, the challenges of cloud adoption, and the potential of cloud computing for the future.

A new generation of cloud services is on the rise, based on the paradigm of “serverless computing”. This is an active research topic at the Institute for Computer Science in Würzburg, Germany. A recent article in the Communications of the ACM magazine deals with the history, status and potential of serverless computing. In cloud computing, commercial providers make computing resources available on demand to their customers over the Internet, partly offered “serverless”, that is, without servers. Professor Samuel Kounev from Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany explains that the term is misleading because even serverless cloud services don’t get by without servers.

Cloud computing is a rapidly growing industry, with many of the biggest tech companies like Amazon and Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ:GOOG) leading the way. According to the MIT Technology Review, the term “cloud computing” was first used in 1996 at the offices of Compaq Computer. In this piece, we will take a look at the top 20 cloud computing companies in the USA. These companies include Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, Google, Salesforce, SAP, Rackspace, Red Hat, and more. Each of these companies offers a range of cloud computing services, from storage and hosting to software and analytics.