Framing the cloud reasons

There are moments in history where everything seems to happen at the right time for the right reason. This is one of those !
We moved from the digitization era straight to the cloud without fully realizing the implications of it.
The underlying reason of the cloud development is layered as  a good creamy layered cake :-P. Several occasions concur all together, but not one cause alone.
The cloud affirmation has been growing strong for several years. Companies like Amazon or the bigG have bet a lot on it ... and finally they started to collect what they sow. The boundary conditions that have favored such a development are practical and rooted in the exponential growth of the mobile computing and of the social networks.
New services demand to be delivered from everywhere on any kind of platform. The cloud is the natural response of this needs.
It is kind of silly to ask, if those reasons create the cloud or if the cloud create those needs ... it is like to ask if came first the egg or the chicken.
It is more fun to try to understand what will happen. The cloud is the infrastructure that will host our future services.
But beside this obvious fact, how will look like the service provider of the future ?
The first word that come to my mind is agile... agile in the way to deliver and react to the service demand.
The second word is speed ... as velocity to discover and cover new area of business.

IT  Architects are trying to find new patterns to build those digital cathedral that will host the new raising cloudy faith.  After an initial anarchic proliferation of tools and frameworks,  some sign of consolidation seems to shows up. But maybe this is only the beginning of a revolutionary era also on the software development. The challenges brought up by the volumes of the data and the distribution of them have pushed all to rethink the way to solve problems.
Just think to the way we store the data. The RDBMS seems to dominate the world and despite several contenders in the last 20 years nobody seriously contended their supremacy. Today the landscape is changing and NO-SQL DB are contending the throne ... or at least seems to do so when it comes to big data ...
SOA was declared dead and now has risen from his hashes with new forms like REST API and so on...

Those events are creating a disruption on the old way to architect technological services. The focus is shifting more and more on the software and less on the hardware. The approach of the technology vendors is changing. Monopolies are fading away. For some player the way to change has been too slow and some of them is falling down with the rain that a cloudy day always brings whit him.