The emergence of cloud platforms has given rise to new paradigms for dealing with distributed data in the cloud, parallel computing using very large computing clusters as well as rapid application development tools for specialized domains: Cloud-based data stores differ significantly from traditional relational databases, with different query and consistency semantics as well as performance behavior. The MapReduce programming paradigm makes large-scale analytics tasks easy to define. MapReduce implementations allow massive computing clusters to be used while tolerating faults that are inevitable at such scales. Similarly, but in a very different context, Dev 2.0 platforms allow simple business applications to be developed by end-users using always-on hosted platforms in the cloud, obviating the need for traditional development and thereby increasing business agility.