All technology evangelists talk about revolutions. Even they just have a classic product to demonstrate. So, if I tell you that the Cloud will change the IT industry, you may consider that I'm biased, being a CloudBees employee. Anyway, I'm convinced that a huge shift has been introduced by the Cloud technologies and the way in which we develop a software and use it to host the application will enter a new age. To demonstrate my point of view, let's compare with another major revolution that changed the industry all around the world.

In the late 19th century, industry development discovered the flexibility of using electric engines compared to traditional steam ones. This was a huge improvement and was adopted for most of the activities. At this time, every manufactory has its own generator, sized to produce power for the engines they used internally.

With the adoption of electricity, sharing resources and concentrating on the generation of electricity was a natural shift from dedicated on-premise generators. This was a major improvement to reduce costs and to improve reliability and flexibility. First, power plants were created by large manufactories for their internal needs but quickly, a dedicated industry emerged, specializing in large-scale electricity generators.