While talking with a friend recently, they were excited about some of the new services available from cloud vendors. These PaaS (Platform as a Service) or SaaS (Software as a Service) items can be very useful and exciting in for developers. The APIs often are easy to consume and use when building an application.

While talking about cloud technology, I noted that the IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) options at many providers have been very powerful and popular. Many of my customers have been taking advantage of these, more than I would have suspected a few years ago.

I was surprised that my friend thought that IaaS, which are often just VMs, was an "old" technology. I think the concept is old (though so are PaaS and SaaS), but the options have grown and there is a lot of power in using an IaaS platform. I do think that many developers might find this boring or less exciting than other options, but I do think that many times developers get caught up what technologies are exciting and newer to others in the same industry.

That got me to thinking. What technologies do I think are cutting edge? I'm not often someone that looks to bleed with new options, but I do find them interesting. For me, I think these are often the ML/AI options from vendors, as well as the IoT/Edge options that are being offered to offload and distribute computing power. I might include Blockchain as something that is too new for me, but has possibilities i the database space. I think F# is still cutting edge to me as well.

We don't use any of these at my job, but we might at some point. I wonder today, what is cutting edge to you, and what might be in use by your organization?