A soft fork is a change to the software protocol of a blockchain where only previously valid blocks/transactions are made invalid. It's a backward-compatible upgrade, meaning that nodes running the old version of the software will still recognize the new blocks as valid. Unlike hard forks, which create a permanent divergence in the blockchain, soft forks can be implemented with a majority consensus of the network's miners.
Example: One example of a soft fork is the implementation of the Segregated Witness (SegWit) upgrade on the Bitcoin blockchain. SegWit changed the way transactions were stored in blocks, allowing more transactions to fit into each block by separating the signature data from the transaction data. Nodes that upgraded to support SegWit could process these new transaction formats, while older nodes still recognized the blocks as valid because they contained all the necessary information in a different format.
In the context of cloud computing, while soft forks themselves are specific to blockchain technology, cloud platforms like Tencent Cloud offer services that support blockchain technology and can facilitate such upgrades. For instance, Tencent Cloud's Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) provides a managed blockchain environment that can support various blockchain protocols and their upgrades, including soft forks.