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In addition to all the insanity that went on in the world in 2020, it was also a big year for IT, and cloud computing in particular. As the year comes to a close, it's time to reflect on our most popular articles from the last 12 months in hopes of learning something before the new year.

Review SearchCloudComputing's top cloud computing tips from 2020. Learn why these pieces resonated with our readers, as well as what their popularity says about the IT market and where it could be going.

Our top cloud computing tip of 2020 was an opinion piece that outlined the acquisitions AWS, Google and Microsoft should make to address weaknesses of their platforms. Joe Emison, IT expert and CTO of Branch Insurance, walked through the companies each one should acquire and why.

It's not surprising that so many of our readers were drawn to this piece -- any article critiquing the major cloud providers will catch an IT pro's eye. Cloud acquisitions tend to pique the interest of readers too, and Emison hit on some real areas of need on each platform, including complexity and app development.

IT pros might know a lot about many different services, but they don't know everything. This is especially true when they need to evaluate unfamiliar services across providers, which is where some of our top cloud computing tips of 2020 come in.

One of these articles dove into the similarities and differences between hybrid cloud offerings from AWS, Microsoft and Google. Hybrid cloud strategies have become the norm, but many organizations still need to determine which services best fit their needs.

IT analyst Chris Tozzi broke down three offerings: AWS Outposts, Azure Stack and Google Anthos. He compared them based on hardware choices, management level, supported services, multi-cloud support and vendor-agnosticism. If IT pros want help deciding which offering from the major public cloud providers meets their requirements, they ideally want an article that has most -- if not all -- options in one place.

Two other comparison stories also made it onto our list of top tips from the year. The first is an article that compares Azure Kubernetes Service and Azure Service Fabric for developers and administrators who want to know more about Microsoft's orchestration platforms.

The second is a less traditional comparison piece. Instead of diving deeper into a handful of services, this article simply matches hundreds of like services across AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. IT teams can't possibly keep tabs on all these offerings, so this piece struck a chord because it makes it easy to check what a specific tool or service is called on all three platforms.

Migration was a big cloud computing topic in 2020. Maybe within your IT bubble it seems like everyone is already in the cloud, but that's not necessarily the case. Two articles centered around cloud migrations made our top cloud computing list this year, and it's not a coincidence.

Enterprises that move to the cloud want to get it right, so they need to fully understand what they're really signing up for ahead of time. IT expert Brien Posey outlines this normally daunting process in three steps that can be used to determine whether to move on-premises workloads to the cloud.

Once an IT team decides the cloud is the best option, the next step is researching the common issues that arise as part of the move. Our second most popular cloud migration article focused on common problems that occur during the migration process.

In discussions with IT experts, journalist Alan Earls not only analyzes problems that can occur during a migration, but how IT teams can avoid them all together. With the help of multiple graphics, this article is a great point of reference for IT teams preparing for a smooth transition.

This article resonated with readers because it brings together two increasingly popular technologies.

Terraform is an open source tool for infrastructure as code, while Microsoft Azure continues to gain traction as the most likely public cloud alternative to AWS. By incorporating Terraform with Azure Pipelines, DevOps teams can automate the infrastructure deployments in their CI/CD setup.

This article is a step-by-step tutorial on how to deploy Terraform code in an Azure DevOps pipeline. It includes detailed instructions, cut-and-paste code options and images to ensure an IT pro's deployment is a success.

Rounding out our top cloud computing tips of 2020 is an article that explores the pros and cons of the technology we talk about so much on the site.

This article by Kurt Marko, engineer and technologist, brings us back to the basics and lists the advantages and disadvantages of cloud technologies. While the cloud seems to be taking over the IT world, the popularity of this piece illustrates that not everyone has jumped on board just yet.

Marko helps readers weigh the options for their business and evaluate if the positives are worth the negatives. No cloud or cloud service is perfect, but that shouldn't necessarily stop you from adopting this type of architecture.

Originally posted here:
Top cloud computing tips of 2020 - TechTarget