INNOVATION FOR THE NEXT GENERATION Tangential innovations in the cloud’s first and second generations have made way for another generation of cloud development that will focus on decentralization of resources. Although there has been a decade-long explosion of cloud research and development, there is significant innovation yet to come in the infrastructure, middleware, and applications and delivery areas. As shown in the Next-Generation Developments block in Figure 1, in the next five years, computing as a utility will be miniaturized and available outside of large data centers. Sun Microsystems first demonstrated these ideas, referred to as Cloud in a Box, in 2006 and paved the way for fog/edge computing. The use of hardware accelerators, such as graphics processing units (GPUs), in the cloud began in 2010 and is now leading to the inclusion of even more specialized accelerators that are, for example, customized for modern machine-learning or artificial intelligence workloads. Google provides Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) that are customized for such workloads, with the aim of delivering new hardware and software stacks that extend machine-learning and artificial intelligence capabilities both within and outside the cloud.