Top Cloud Trends to Watch in 2025: Implications for Platform Engineers

This blog will look at these emerging patterns, their implications for platform engineers, and the tactics required to adjust to them.

1. Multicloud Architectures' Ascension

Multicloud strategies, where organizations use multiple cloud providers for different workloads, are set to become the norm. Companies are increasingly avoiding lock-in to a single cloud provider, aiming to enhance flexibility, cost efficiency, and redundancy.

Gartner predicts that by 2025, 70% of enterprises will use multicloud or hybrid cloud environments for mission-critical applications.

For platform engineers, the challenge lies in managing multiple cloud environments and ensuring seamless integration between them. Engineers must optimize cloud resource management to avoid complexity, reduce operational overhead, and meet compliance standards. Key tools such as Kubernetes and Terraform will continue to gain traction, offering automation for cross-cloud orchestration.

2. Serverless Computing Adoption

Serverless computing, or Function as a Service (FaaS), is shifting the cloud computing paradigm by allowing developers to focus on business logic without managing infrastructure. As cloud providers refine their serverless offerings, platform engineers will need to focus on optimizing workloads and ensuring high availability.

Research by MarketsandMarkets forecasts the serverless computing market to grow from $18.4 billion in 2023 to $44.7 billion by 2029, representing a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 25.5%. (source - https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports)

• 41% of enterprises reported using serverless technologies in their production environments in 2023 (State of Cloud Native Development 2023, CNCF).

Platform engineers will need to focus on ensuring observability and performance monitoring for serverless functions. While serverless offers significant cost savings and operational efficiency, it can also lead to challenges with latency, debugging, and managing cold starts. Engineers will need to implement tooling for better error tracking and performance analysis, as well as understand how serverless fits into the larger architecture alongside other cloud services.

3. Green Cloud Practices

As organizations increasingly prioritize sustainability, green cloud practices are becoming more critical.

Platform engineers need to ensure that their cloud architectures are designed with energy efficiency and environmental sustainability in mind. This involves selecting cloud service providers that use renewable energy sources, optimizing resource usage to minimize waste, and implementing strategies to reduce the carbon footprint of cloud operations.

4. Development of AI and Machine Learning Infrastructure

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) workloads are increasing in prominence, pushing the need for specialized infrastructure. Cloud providers are developing more tailored services for ML and AI, including high-performance GPUs and TPUs, distributed machine learning platforms, and dedicated hardware accelerators.

Platform engineers will need to ensure that cloud architectures are optimized for ML and AI models. This includes designing systems that support scalable and cost-effective GPU clusters, handling data pipelines efficiently, and maintaining high throughput. Engineers will also need to stay updated on emerging AI/ML cloud services like Google AI Platform and AWS SageMaker to ensure optimal resource provisioning and management.

• The global cloud Al market is estimated to grow from USD 80.30 billion to USD 327.15 billion by 2029 at a CAGR of 32.4% from 2024 to 2029
  (source - https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports)

5. Edge Computing Integration

Edge computing, which processes data closer to where it is generated rather than sending it to a centralized cloud data center, is gaining significant traction. In 2025, more enterprises will look to integrate edge computing into their cloud strategies, driven by the increasing number of IoT devices and real-time data requirements.

The Edge computing market size is expected to grow from USD 60.0 billion in 2024 to USD 110.6 billion by 2029 at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of 13.0% during the forecast period.
(source - https://www.marketsandmarkets.com/Market-Reports)

Platform engineers will need to develop distributed architectures that span both the cloud and edge devices. This involves ensuring secure and reliable connectivity between edge devices and cloud platforms, managing decentralized workloads, and ensuring low-latency data processing. Edge computing will require new approaches to monitoring and debugging, as engineers will be working with dispersed systems and data sources.

6. Cloud-Native Security

As organizations move more critical workloads to the cloud, security has become a paramount concern. In 2025, the focus will shift towards building security into cloud-native environments from the ground up, as opposed to retrofitting traditional security practices.

Platform engineers will need to integrate advanced security practices into their cloud-native workflows. This includes using tools like AWS Shield, Google Cloud Armor, and Azure Security Center to ensure protection across cloud environments. Engineers will also focus on implementing practices like zero-trust architecture and adopting automated security posture management tools to prevent configuration errors.

7. Cloud Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Maturity

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) has already disrupted traditional infrastructure management, and in 2025, IaC tools will be further integrated into the DevOps pipelines. As cloud environments become more complex, IaC will evolve to support more advanced features like real-time validation, automated rollback, and more granular control over resource provisioning.

For platform engineers, mastering IaC tools will be critical. Not only will they need to ensure code is scalable and maintainable, but they will also need to adopt best practices around version control, testing, and continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. Automation will help mitigate human error, but engineers will need to continuously update and test their IaC templates to keep up with new cloud features.

According to a 2023 survey by HashiCorp, 69% of enterprises already use IaC in production environments. The number of enterprises adopting Terraform and Ansible is expected to increase by 40% over the next two years.

8. Polymorphic Containers (and Multi-Cloud Strategies)

Platform engineers will need to manage and integrate applications across multiple cloud providers to avoid vendor lock-in and use the unique strengths of each cloud platform. This involves using tools like OpenTofu to create polymorphic infrastructure as code that can be deployed across different cloud service providers.

While containers offer scalability and portability, overreliance on them can introduce complexities and security concerns. Platform engineers should adopt a balanced approach, using containers where they add value but also leveraging CSP-specific services to avoid unnecessary overhead and security risks.

By adopting multi-cloud strategies and using containers judiciously, platform engineers can ensure high availability, fault tolerance, and the ability to scale applications efficiently across different cloud environments.

Conclusion

As we look ahead to 2025, cloud computing will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. Platform engineers will play a central role in adapting to these changes, navigating new architectures, and implementing the latest technologies. Whether managing multicloud environments, optimizing for AI/ML workloads, or integrating cutting-edge technologies like quantum computing, engineers must focus on automation, security, and scalability.

By understanding the trends outlined here, platform engineers can stay ahead of the curve, ensuring that their cloud infrastructure is both resilient and efficient in the face of these emerging challenges.