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Contact UsModel Metrics is fortunate enough to work with three really interesting – and really different – companies in the Cloud Computing space: Salesforce.com, Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. The question I get most often is “What’s the difference?”
It’s a fair question, so let me answer it using a food analogy.*
Amazon Web Services – AWS – is a bunch of raw ingredients: flour, egg, vanilla – everything you need if you want to bake a pretty decent cake. But you have to know which ingredients to use, how to combine them and how long to cook the whole thing for.
Google App Engine – GAE – is a cake mix. It has most of the ingredients but you have to add some and do a bunch of work. You have to add eggs and oil, stir, bake and frost. You do that work using their recipe and you do indeed get a pretty tasty cake.
Salesforce.com – SFDC – is a fully baked chocolate cake.** And you get to pick the frosting. You can use the frosting it comes with out of the can or you can make your own. And if want vanilla or fudge marble, you can probably make that happen too.
What will be interesting is to watch how the different players in this market try to climb the food chain to be more cake like. AWS and GAE may never choose to create a full cake the way that SFDC has but, then again, they might. I’m pretty convinced SFDC will keep their lead in this area for a long time to come.
After SFDC, I’m most interested in AWS – there’s a lot of real power there. For the next few years, there will be some really interesting work done in fork lifting applications from some dirt bound deployment to AWS.*** Organizations looking to gain instant benefit from Cloud Computing can by simply deploying a bit differently than they do today. AWS is a great destination.
That’s my cake analogy. Hopefully it gives you a taste for the flavors of Cloud Computing you might take advantage of. ****
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* Food. Yum yum yum. If you’re coming to Dreamforce 2009 and are looking for food, come find me and we’ll go get something. You’ll probably need to remind me of this post.
** True signs you use an iPhone too much: you try to insert a period using a double space. As I just did here. Three times.
*** GAE isn’t a great option for this – GAE works best for new development.
**** Get it? “Taste?” “Flavor?” Awesome, I know.
