Virtual machines powered the original revolution in the cloud. However, the serverless revolution will be even bigger.

Remember when it used to take weeks to deploy a new application? You had to requisition new hardware, wait for its arrival, install an OS, setup a Rack, and plug it into your data center. In most cases this meant waiting for your IT team and getting approval from several layers of management. You could put in a request for hardware, go on an extended vacation, and come back to find nothing was done.

Much of this tedium was done away with Virtual Machine technology. Now, with a single click you can provision and launch a “machine” that was preconfigured with all the necessary software and settings. New applications could be ...