How is AWS (Amazon Web Services) different from Salesforce? (Technical Answer Required)

Hi Shaharyar,

Amazon EC2 is an Infrastructure as a Service which offers pay-by-hour servers (EC2), storage (S3) etc. You bring your own software to the table - OS (Red Hat, Windows, whatever), Database (MySQL, Oracle, DB2, whatever), Search (your pick), Business Intelligence (Cognos, Oracle BI, whatever) - and then you piece it together and get it all to work. The benefits are that you can do whatever you want - and the con is you have to manage complexity yourself.

Force.com, by contrast, is a Platform as a Service that provides a pre-integrated offering that already has a database, search, BI Reports, identity/security etc. all built in - that you program using a Java-like language (Apex). With the newly announced VMforce, a VMware and Salesforce.com offering, you will be able to use Java soon. Force.com automatically backs up your data, manages upgrades (your apps don't need to know if Force.com is running on database version 11i or 11g, Dell boxes or Sun boxes, Linux or Windows etc.)

Thanks.