The top 8 technologies that companies are using to modernize their IT in the age of cloud computing and AI, according to experts

• The pace at which companies are moving to the cloud is only accelerating - and it means a rethinking of the ways in which they build and maintain their applications.
• The way companies buy the technology that helps them modernize is changing: It's increasingly developers, not the IT department, who make the decisions around which technology to buy.
• Increasingly, companies are using popular open source software to run their applications, which is built by armies of volunteer developers from all over the world.
• We spoke to experts about the top technologies that developers are turning to when it comes to powering digital transformation.
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The rise of cloud computing upended the traditional thinking of IT departments. Rather than run your own servers or data centers, it was suddenly vastly more efficient to run some, or perhaps even all, of your infrastructure by hosting it from a mega-cloud like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

That shift has led to new ways to make and manage software, all the better to take advantage of the massive amounts of computing power and flexibility afforded by renting capacity from one of the tech titans' own super-efficient data centers.

Business Insider spoke with experts to talk about the foundational software that developers are turning to in order to bring about the next wave of digital transformation, as companies in every industry look to modernize themselves to meet the challenges of the new decade and deliver more software, faster. Below, you can find our list of the top 8 developer technologies that are providing the underpinnings for digital transformation.

One of the major trends is a focus on open source projects, or software that's free for anyone to use, contribute code to, or download. According to a survey from Black Duck Software and North Bridge, three out of every four companies run on open source software.

"There has been a revolution over the last five to ten years years," Dan Kohn, executive director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, told Business Insider. "Open source technology has been the underlying driver of that. There is a belief that the fundamental tooling should be open source."

Another big change is that developers now have increased latitude to pick their own tools, rather than have a CIO or IT department choose for them. Increasingly, developers are trying out free software they find online, with the rest of the company adopting it if and when it shows results in helping it move quicker, Kohn says.

Finally, it's important amid all of this change to make sure that developers themselves know all of their options. New and experienced developers alike need to work hard to stay abreast of the major changes in the industry.

"One thing I would look into is learning in the industry," RedMonk industry analyst KellyAnn Fitzpatrick. "If you think of all these new technologies that developers have to learn, whether they're just starting out or they're mid-career. How do we actually allow developers to acquire the knowledge they need? How do enterprises figure out how to keep their own developers up to date on these types of things?"

These are eight hot developer technologies that companies are using to bring themselves into the modern era, according to experts: