Tag Archives: salesforce.com

azure, microsoft, professional, systems, windows

Making sense of Microsoft’s Cloud OS

January 15, 2013 onlyconnect 4 Comments

People have been talking about “the internet operating system” for years. The phrase may have been muttered in Netscape days in the nineties, when the browser was going to be the operating system; then in the 2000s it was the Google OS that people discussed. Most notably though, Tim O’Reilly reflected on the subject, for example here in 2010 (though as he notes, he had been using the phrase way earlier than that):

Ask yourself for a moment, what is the operating system of a Google or Bing search? What is the operating system of a mobile phone call? What is the operating system of maps and directions on your phone? What is the operating system of a tweet?

On a standalone computer, operating systems like Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux manage the machine’s resources, making it possible for applications to focus on the job they do for the user. But many of the activities that are most important to us today take place in a mysterious space between individual machines.

It is still worth reading, as he teases out what OS components look like in the context of an internet operating system, and notes that there are now several (but only a few) competing internet operating systems, platforms which our smart mobile phones or tablets tap into and to some extent lock us in.

But what on earth (or in the heavens) is Microsoft’s “Cloud OS”? I first heard the term in the context of Server 2012, when it was in preview at the end of 2011. Microsoft seems to like how it sounds, because it is getting another push in the context of System Center 2012 Service Pack 1, just announced. In particular, Michael Park from Server and Tools has posted on the subject:

At the highest level, the Cloud OS does what a traditional operating system does – manage applications and hardware – but at the scope and scale of cloud computing. The foundations of the Cloud OS are Windows Server and Windows Azure, complemented by the full breadth of our technology solutions, such as SQL Server, System Center and Visual Studio. Together, these technologies provide one consistent platform for infrastructure, apps and data that can span your datacenter, service provider datacenters, and the Microsoft public cloud.

In one sense, the concept is similar to that discussed by O’Reilly, though in the context of enterprise computing, whereas O’Reilly looks at a bigger picture embracing our personal as well as business lives. Never forget though that this is marketing speak, and Microsoft consciously works to blur together the idealised principles behind cloud computing with its specific set of products: Windows Azure, Window Server, and especially System Center, its server and device management piece.

A nagging voice tells me there is something wrong with this picture. It is this: the cloud is meant to ease the administrative burden by making compute power an abstracted resource, managed by a third party far away in a datacenter in ways that we do not need to know. System Center on the other hand is a complex and not altogether consistent suite of products which imposes a substantial administrative burden on those who install and maintain it. If you have to manage your own cloud, do you get any cloud computing benefit?

The benefit is diluted; but there is plentiful evidence that many businesses are not yet ready or willing to hand over their computer infrastructure to a third-party. While System Center is in one sense the opposite of cloud computing, in another sense it counts because it has the potential to deliver cloud benefits to the rest of the business.

Further confusing matters, there are elements of public cloud in Microsoft’s offering, specifically Windows Azure and Windows Intune. Other bits of Microsoft’s cloud, like Office 365 and Outlook.com, do not count here because that is another department, see. Park does refer to them obliquely:

Running more than 200 cloud services for over 1 billion customers and 20+ million businesses around the world has taught us – and teaches us in real time – what it takes to architect, build and run applications and services at cloud scale.

We take all the learning from those services into the engines of the Cloud OS – our enterprise products and services – which customers and partners can then use to deliver cloud infrastructure and services of their own.

There you have it. The Cloud OS is “our enterprise products and services” which businesses can use to deliver their own cloud services.

What if you want to know in more detail what the Cloud OS is all about? Well, then you have to understand System Center, which is not something that can be explained in a few words. I did have a go at this, in a feature called Inside Microsoft’s private cloud – a glossary of terms, for which the link is currently giving a PHP error, but maybe it will work for you.

It will all soon be a little out of date, since System Center 2012 SP1 has significant new features. If you want a summary of what is actually new, I recommend this post by Mike Schutz on System Center 2012 SP1; and this post also by Schutz on Windows Intune and System Center Configuration Manager SP1.

My even shorter summary:

All System Center products now updated to run on, and manage, Server 2012
Upgraded Virtual Machine Manager supports up to 8000 VMs on clusters of up to 64 hosts
Management support for Hyper-V features introduced in Server 2012 including the virtual network switch
App Controller integrates with VMs offered by hosting service providers as well as those on Azure and in your own datacenter
App Controller can migrate VMs to Windows Azure (and maybe back); a nice feature
New Azure service called Global Service Monitor for monitoring web applications
Back up servers to Azure with Data Protection Manager

and on the device and client management side, new Intune and Configuration Manager features. It is confusing; Intune is a kind-of cloud based Configuration Manager but has features that are not included in the on-premise Configuration Manager and vice versa. So:

Intune can now manage devices running Windows RT, Windows Phone 8, Android and iOS
Intune has a self-service portal for installing business apps
Configuration Manager integrates with Intune to get supposedly seamless support for additional devices
Configuration Manager adds support for Windows 8 and Server 2012
PowerShell control of Configuration Manager
Ability to manage Mac OS X, Linux and Unix servers in Configuration Manager

What do I think of System Center? On the plus side, all the pieces are in place to manage not only Microsoft servers but a diverse range of servers and a similarly diverse range of clients and devices, presuming the features work as advertised. That is a considerable achievement.

On the negative side, my impression is that Microsoft still has work to do. What would help would be more consistency between the Azure public cloud and the System Center private cloud; a reduction of the number of products in the System Center suite; a consistent user interface across the entire suite; and simplification along the lines of what has been done in the new Azure portal so that these products are easier and more enjoyable to use.

I would add that any business deploying System Center should be thinking carefully about what they still feel they need to manage on-premise, and what can be handed over to public cloud infrastructure, whether Azure or elsewhere. The ability to migrate VMs to Azure could be a key enabler in that respect.

cloud computing, development, salesforce.com, software development, web authoring

Interview: Salesforce.com exec Parker Harris on the technology behind the platform

July 26, 2012 onlyconnect 1 Comment

A couple of months ago, I attended Cloudforce in London, where I spoke to Salesforce.com co-founder Parker Harris, Executive Vice President, Technology.

The Salesforce.com platform is interesting for all sorts of reasons. The company has been a powerful advocate of cloud computing from before its adoption by other industry giants, and its service is as far as I can tell well liked by its customers. The technology is interesting as well. The CRM (Customer Relationship Management) application that is the core of the Salesforce.com offering is both a web application and a web service API, with more transactions conducted programmatically than through the browser. The Force.com platform is multi-tenanted, and the company believes that only this type of platform delivers the full benefits of cloud computing. In December 2010 the company acquired Heroku, at the time a company dedicated to running Ruby applications in the cloud, though it now has a broader offering. Salesforce.com was also where I first heard the term “Social Enterprise”, a phrase now taken up by others such as IBM and Microsoft; in fact, Social Enterprise was the dominant theme at Cloudforce.

I asked Harris how the company copes with scaling its platform as demand grows.

“We’ve gone through a few changes. We came up years ago with a concept we call a ‘pod’, which is one set of multi-tenant customers. There’s a database in there, there’s application servers, search servers, all kinds of things. So that was a unit of scale. And we invested heavily in capacity planning, just to watch and see how those grow, and so we fill them up to a certain size and then we grow horizontally and add more.”

Harris adds that pods are organised in sets called super-pods, which provides isolation in the event of a failure.

One of the goals is to make the system scale horizontally, whereas the Oracle database on which the platform is built tends to be a vertical unit of scale. "

“We’re doing a lot of research work in looking at horizontal scalable systems like Hbase for example, to look at how can we do more horizontal stores. And then finally we’re in the middle of a process of moving a lot of our processing to completely asynchronous handling, so that as transactions come in they’re being handled in an asynchronous way. Even though the consumer feels like it’s synchronous, the back end will be completely asynchronous, which will then give us even more control and capability to scale.”

In the past I have thought of the Force.com platform as in effect a big database. I asked Harris if that is still the case?

“We have big databases, but I think of it more as a meta-data platform. Behind that meta-data we do have a big database, we also have a big file store, we have a big search engine, which is another unit. That’s really what you know as Salesforce.com. And that’s fully multi-tenant, it’s way at the extreme end of multi-tenancy.

“Heroku is really virtualised single tenancy. So it’s more towards an infrastructure as a service layer. For some workloads and some use cases that’s fine. If you want the predictability of ‘the software I wrote on my computer needs to run exactly the same here’, that’s where that takes place. But you don’t have the higher-level capabilities of Force.com, you don’t have everything working out of the box.

“Where we’re headed is, you’ll have the 4GL of Force.com, you’re going to have the 3GL of Heroku, and you’ll be able to choose.”

At one time Salesforce has a partnership with VMWare called VMForce. What happened to that?

“We don’t have a technical partnership with VMWare, but we do have a close relationship with them. We want to have applications that work in VMWare’s cloud able to move into Heroku or vice versa. Really what happened is, we started the relationship with VMWare and then we discovered Heroku. We were just blown away by the technology there and the team, and that was when we ended up acquiring Heroku, but we still see VMWare as a huge partner. We’re a big customer of VMWare, they’re a big customer of ours.”

You talked at Cloudforce about HTML mobile apps versus native apps, and you seem to be more on the HTML side?

“I was making the point of HTML versus native code. This is an argument that goes on inside of Salesforce, it is a religious debate, but I believe that you can build some extremely rich applications with native code, and you can build them very quickly. The complexity for me happens when you introduce business systems that are on an enterprise platform. If you think about our metadata engine, it’s very powerful, and I can create triggers, I can change the UI, I can do all these magic things, and immediately it works. Change the UI into Japanese, it immediately works.

“If I’m building something 100% native, I have to replicate that platform in the native code, and that’s for me a no-win situation, because this is going to keep moving, and the native code will be behind, it will be playing catch-up. So if it’s for an enterprise business system on a platform like ours that’s metadata driven, you really need to have that be directly from the cloud.

“If you think about the Chatter feed or the business forms, that I believe needs to be HTML5. But I want to use the camera, I want to have files local to the device, that I can open, and various programs, I want location to work, and maybe I want to use the map application: so there are some native assets too. And then when you think of security, I don’t want to have to go to a web page and enter my username and password, and maybe have to VPN in, I don’t want to do that every time I use the application.

“So instead what you do is have a native container that wraps all this HTML5 code, gives you access to things like the camera, but also is a way to store an Oauth token, it now has the right to access my data, and from then on I can just use the application. It’s really high usability.

“I also think we still have a sometimes-disconnected world. That’s frustrating. So I do think there should be a cache, a recent cache of what you’re working on. That’s my view of where we should be going with these disconnected use cases.

“So that’s where we’re going, and we’re open sourcing a lot of this. We have a native container and we’re open sourcing it so people can see how we built it and add to it. We’ve got a UI framework that we’re going to be open sourcing. It’s an HTML5 component framework. Touch, that we announced last year and is going beta now, Touch is built with that framework, and that’s the framework that we will eventually open source so people can use it with their own applications.”

Do you use PhoneGap/Cordova for the native wrapper?

“We do. We do a lot on WebKit-enabled browsers, and when you think of the native container, it’s really going through PhoneGap to get to some of the local resources.”

What about your SOAP and REST APIs?

“We have backward compatibility for all of our APIs, because we don’t want to force people to rewrite their code. We do see lots of use cases for SOAP, but more and more people are doing RESTful interfaces, and when their writing these mobile applications they really want REST APIs so we’re building a lot more of our own.”

How has Heroku evolved since you made that acquisition?

“There are a couple of huge events. One is, they were just a Ruby platform when we acquired them, and now they are a polyglot platform, so they can run many different languages. They’ve also shown how they’ve built support for these other languages, so other people are able to write support for other languages.

“The other big change was when Facebook on their developer page said, if you want to build a Facebook page or application, here’s how to do it, and if you want it hosted in the cloud, use Heroku. There may be others by now, but we saw a massive uptake in the number of applications being created. We’ve seen a huge number of applications grow from when we acquired it to now and with a big spike through that Facebook relationship.

“We have Heroku enterprise bundles that are available now. People are buying Heroku as part of a SELA, or a Social Enterprise License Agreement.

“Developer adoption is still very important. We want to monetise it, but we don’t want to lose this huge asset of the appeal to the developer community. It’s still early for Heroku.”

I also spoke to Harris about the Social Enterprise concept, but will post that separately.

cloud computing, java, salesforce.com

Heroku gets Java, Salesforce.com embraces HTML5 for mobile

August 31, 2011 onlyconnect

Salesforce.com has made a host of announcements at its Dreamforce conference currently under way in San Francisco. In brief:

Chatter, the Salesforce.com social networking platform for enterprises, is being extended with presence status, screen sharing, approval actions, and the ability to create groups with customers as well as with internal users. Salesforce.com calls this the Social Enterprise.
Heroku, a service for hosting Ruby applications which Salesforce.com acquired in 2010, will now also support Java.
Salesforce.com is baking mobile support into its applications via HTML 5. The new mobile, touch-friendly user interface is called Touch.salesforce.com.

Other announcements include the general availability of database.com, a cloud database service announced at last year’s Dreamforce, and a new service called Data.com which provides company information though a combination of Dun and Bradstreet’s data along with information from Jigsaw.

I spoke to EMEA VP Tim Barker about the announcements. Does Java on Heroku replace the VMForce platform, which lets you run Java applications on VMWare using the Spring framework plus access to Salesforce.com APIs? Barker is diplomatic and says it is a developer choice, but adds that VMForce “was an inspiration for us, to see that we needed Java language on Heroku as well.”

My observation is that since the introduction of VMForce, VMWare has come up with other cloud-based initiatives, and the Salesforce.com no longer seems to be a key platform. These two companies have grown apart.

For more information on Java on Heroku, see the official announcement. Heroku was formed in part to promote hosted Ruby as an alternative to Java, so this is a bittersweet moment for the platform, and the announcement has an entertaining analysis of Java’s strengths and weaknesses, including the topic “How J2EE detailed Java”:

J2EE was built for a world of application distribution — that is, software packaged to be run by others, such as licensed software. But it was put to use in a world of application development and deployment — that is, software-as-a-service. This created a perpetual impedance mismatch between technology and use case. Java applications in the modern era suffer greatly under the burden of this mismatch.

Naturally the announcement goes on to explain how Heroku has solved this mismatch. Note that Heroku also supports Clojure and Node.js.

What about Database.com, why is it more expensive than other cloud database services? “It is a trusted platform that we operate, and not a race to the bottom in terms of the cheapest possible way to build an application,” says Barker.

That said, note that you can get a free account, which includes 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions per month and support for three enterprise users.

What are the implications of the HTML5-based Touch.salesforce.com for existing Salesforce.com mobile apps, or the Flex SDK and Adobe AIR support in the platform? “We do have an existing set of apps,” says Barker. “We have Salesforce mobile which supports Blackberry, iOS and Android. We also have an application for Chatter. Native apps are an important part of our strategy. But what we’ve found is that for customer apps and for broad applications, to be able to deliver all the functionality, we’re finding the best approach is using HTML 5.”

The advantage of the HTML5 approach for customers is that it comes for free with the platform.

As for Adobe AIR, it is still being used and is a good choice if you need a desktop application. That said, I got the impression that Salesforce.com sees HTML5 as the best solution to the problem of supporting a range of mobile operating systems.

I have been following Salesforce.com closely for several years, during which time the platform has grown steadily and shown impressive consistency. “We grew 38% year on year in Q2,” says Barker. This year’s Dreamforce apparently has nearly 45,000 registered attendees, which is 50% up on last year, though I suspect this may include free registrations for the keynotes and exhibition. Nevertheless, the company claims “the world’s largest enterprise software conference”. Oracle OpenWorld 2010 reported around 41,000 attendees.

amazon, cloud computing, java, professional, salesforce.com, software development

Fit for business? Google updates App Engine with the Enterprise in mind

April 4, 2011 onlyconnect 2 Comments

Google has updated App Engine to 1.4.3. The new version adds:

Prospective Search API for Python – this lets you register a large set of queries which are executed against a flow of data so you can create notifications or other actions whenever a match is found.

Testbed Unit Test Framework for Python – this lets you create stubs for Google services for lightweight unit tests.

Concurrent requests for Java – a single application instance can now serve multiple requests provided it is marked threadsafe. An important feature.

Java Remote API – the remote API lets you access an App Engine datastore from your local machine.

I have had the sense that Google App Engine is more attractive to start-ups and small organisations than to enterprise customers. It is interesting to see Google working on bringing the Java and Python runtimes closer to parity, as Java is more widely used for enterprise development.

Another initiative aimed at enterprise customers is App Engine for Business, currently in preview. What you get is:

An Enterprise Administration Console console for managing all apps built by your company, with access control lists.

99.9% service level agreement

Hosted SQL:

While many applications can be built on the App Engine Datastore (which uses Google’s BigTable database system), we know SQL is the industry standard for the enterprise, so we’ve got you covered. SQL database support on App Engine gives enterprise developers access to the full capabilities of a dedicated relational database, without the headache of managing it.

SSL to an URL that uses your domain, such as https://myapp.apps.example.com.

Pricing – $8 per user up to a maximum of $1000 per month. In other words, if you have more than 125 users the cost per user starts coming down; if you have 1000 users it is a bargain.

Has Google done enough to make App Engine attractive to enterprise customers? This post from a frustrated developer back in November 2010 complained about stability issues and other annoyances that do not really exist on Amazon or Microsoft Azure; the Salesforce.com platform does have some throttling limitations. But it does seem that Google is determined to address the issues and App Engine for Business looks promising.

cloud computing, open source, salesforce.com, software development

The Salesforce.com platform play

December 9, 2010 onlyconnect

I’ve been mulling over the various Salesforce.com announcements here at Dreamforce, which taken together attempt to transition Salesforce.com from being a cloud CRM provider to becoming a cloud platform for generic applications. Of course this transition is not new – it began years ago with Force.com and the creation of the Apex language – and it might not be successful; but that is the aim, and this event is a pivotal moment with the announcement of database.com and the Heroku acquisition.

One thing I’ve found interesting is that Salesforce.com sees Microsoft Azure as its main competition in the cloud platform space – even though alternatives such as Google and Amazon are better known in this context. The reason is that Azure is perceived as an enterprise platform whereas Google and Amazon are seen more as commodity platforms. I’m not convinced that there is any technical justification for this view, but I can see that Salesforce.com is reassuringly corporate in its approach, and that customers seem generally satisfied with the support they receive, whereas this is often an issue with other cloud platforms. Salesforce.com is also more expensive of course.

The interesting twist here is that Heroku, which hosts Ruby applications, is more aligned with the Google/Amazon/open source community than with the Salesforce.com corporate culture, and this divide has been a topic of much debate here. Salesforce.com says it wants Heroku to continue running just as it has done, and that it will not interfere with its approach to pricing or the fact that it hosts on Amazon’s servers – though it may add other options. While I am sure this is the intention, the Heroku team is tiny compared to that of its acquirer, and some degree of change is inevitable.

The key thing from the point of view of Salesforce.com is that Heroku remains equally attractive to developers, small or large. While Force.com has not failed exactly, it has not succeeded in attracting the diversity of developers that the company must have hoped for. Note that the revenue of Salesforce.com remains 75%-80% from the CRM application, according to a briefing I had yesterday.

What is the benefit to Salesforce.com of hosting thousands of Ruby developers? If they remain on Heroku as it is at the moment, probably not that much – other than the kudos of supporting a cool development platform. But I’m guessing the company anticipates that a proportion of those developers will want to move to the next level, using database.com and taking advantage of its built-in security features which require user accounts on Force.com. Note that features such as row-level security only work if you use the Force.com user directory. Once customers take that step, they have a significant commitment to the platform and integrating with other Salesforce.com services such as Chatter for collaboration becomes easy.

The other angle on this is that the arrival of Heroku and VMForce gives existing Salesforce.com customers the ability to write applications in full Java or Ruby rather than being restricted to tools like Visualforce and the Apex language. Of course they could do this before by using the web services API and hosting applications elsewhere, but now they will be able to do this entirely on the Salesforce.com cloud platform.

That’s how the strategy looks to me; and it will fascinating to look back a year from now and see how it has played out. While it makes some sense, I am not sure how readily typical Heroku customers will transition to database.com or the Force.com identity platform.

There is another way in which Salesforce.com could win. Heroku knows how to appeal to developers, and in theory has a lot to teach the company about evangelising its platform to a new community.

amazon, azure, cloud computing, internet, microsoft, professional, ruby, salesforce.com, software development

Salesforce.com acquires Heroku, wants your Enterprise apps

December 8, 2010 onlyconnect

The big news today is that Salesforce.com has agreed to acquire Heroku, a company which hosts Ruby applications using an architecture that enables seamless scalability. Heroku apps run on “dynos”, each of which is a single process running Ruby code on the Heroku “grid” – an abstraction which runs on instances of Amazon EC2 virtual machines. To scale your app, you simply add more dynos.

Why is Salesforce.com acquiring Heroku? Well, for some years an interesting question about Salesforce.com has been how it can escape its cloud CRM niche. The obvious approach is to add further applications, which it has done to some extent with FinancialForce, but it seems the strategy now is to become a platform for custom business applications. We already knew about VMForce, a partnership with VMWare currently in beta that lets you host Java applications that are integrated with Force.com, but it is with the announcements here at Dreamforce that the pieces are falling into place. Database.com for data access and storage; now Heroku for Ruby applications.

These services join several others which Salesforce.com is branding at Force.com 2:

Appforce – in effect the old Force.com, build departmental apps with visual tools and declarative code.

Siteforce – again an existing capability, build web sites on Force.com.

ISVForce – build your own multi-tenant application and sign up customers.

Salesforce.com is thoroughly corporate in its approach and its obvious competition is not so much Google AppEngine or Amazon EC2, but Microsoft Azure: too expensive for casual developers, but with strong Enterprise features.

Identity management is key to this battle. Microsoft’s identity system is Active Directory, with federation between local and cloud directories enabling single sign-on. Salesforce.com has its own user directory and developing on its platform will push you towards using it.

Today’s announcement makes sense of something that puzzled me: why we got a session on node.js at Monday’s Cloudstock event. It was a great session and I wrote it up here. Heroku has been experimenting with node.js support, with considerable success, and says it will introduce a new version next year.

Finally, the Heroku acquisition is great news for Enterprise use of Ruby. Today many potential new developers will be looking at it with interest.

amazon, cloud computing, google, professional, salesforce.com, web authoring

Database.com extends the salesforce.com platform

December 8, 2010 onlyconnect 4 Comments

At Dreamforce today Salesforce.com announced its latest platform venture: Database.com. Salesforce.com is built on an Oracle database with various custom optimizations; and database.com now exposes this as a generic cloud database which can be accessed from a variety of languages – Java, .NET, Ruby and PHP – and accessed from applications running on almost any platform: VMForce, Smartphones, Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft Excel, Adobe Flash/Flex and others. One way to use it would via JPA (Java Persistence API) in an VMForce Java application.

The Database.com console is a web application that has a console giving access to your databases and showing useful statistics and system information.

You can also create new databases, specifying the schema and relationships.

The details presented in the keynote today were sketchy – we saw applications that honestly could have been built just as easily with MySQL – but there is more information in the FAQ. The Database.com API is through SOAP or REST web services, not SQL. Third parties can create drivers so you can you use it with SQL APIs such as ODBC or JDBC. There is row level security, and built-in full text search.

According to the FAQ, Database.com “includes a native trigger and stored procedure language”.

Pricing starts from free – for up to 100,000 records, 50,000 transactions and 3 users per month. After than it is $10.00 per month per additional 100,000 records, $10.00 per month per additional 150,000 transactions, and $10.00 per user if you need the built-in authentication and security system – which as you would expect is based on the native force.com identity system.

As far as I can tell one of the goals of Database.com – and also the forthcoming chatter.com free public collaboration service – is to draw users towards the force.com platform.

Roger Jennings has analysed the pricing and reckons that Database.com is much more expensive than Microsoft’s SQL Azure – for 500 users and a 50GB database $15,000 per month for Database.com vs a little over $500 for the same thing on SQL Azure, though the two are difficult to compare directly and he has had to make a number of assumptions. Responding to a question at the press and analyst Q&A today, Benioff seemed to accept that the pricing is relatively high, but justified in his view by the range of services on offer. Of course the pricing could change if it proves uncompetitive.

Unlike SQL Azure, Database.com starts from free, which is a great attraction for developers interested in giving it a try. Trying out Azure is risky because if you leave a service running inadvertently you may run up a big bill.

In practice SQL Azure is likely to be more attractive than Database.com for its core market, existing Microsoft-platform developers. Microsoft experimented with a web services API for SQL Server Data Services in Azure, but ended up offering full SQL, enabling developers to continue working in familiar ways.

Equally, Force.com developers will like Database.com and its integration with the force.com platform.

Some of what Database.com can do is already available through force.com and I am not sure how the pricing looks for organizations that are already big salesforce.com users; I hope to find out more soon.

What is interesting here is the way salesforce.com is making its platform more generic. There will be more force.com announcements tomorrow and I expect to to see further efforts to broaden the platform then.

Update – I had a chat with Database.com General Manager Igor Tsyganskiy. He says Microsoft’s SQL Azure is the closest competitor to Database.com but argues that because Salesforce.com is extending its platform in an organic way it will do a better job than Microsoft which has built a cloud platform from scratch. We did not address the pricing comparison directly, but Tsyganskiy says that existing Force.com customers always have the option to “talk to their Account Executive” so there could be flexibility.

Since Database.com is in one sense the same as Force.com, the API is similar. The underlying query language is SOQL – the Salesforce Object Query Language which is based on SQL SELECT though with limitations. The language for stored procedures and triggers is Apex. SQL drivers from Progress Software are intended to address the demand for SQL access.

I mentioned that Microsoft came under pressure to replace its web services API for SQL Server Data Services with full SQL – might Database.com face similar pressure? We’ll see, said Tsyganskiy. The case is not entirely parallel. SQL Server is a cloud implementation of an existing SQL database with which developers are familiar. Database.com on the other hand abstracts the underlying data store – although Salesforce.com is an Oracle customer, Tsyganskiy said that the platform stores data in a variety of ways so should not be thought of as a wrapper for an Oracle database server.

Although Database.com is designed to be used from anywhere, I’d guess that Java running on VMForce with JPA, and following today’s announcement Heroku apps also hosted by Salesforce.com, will be the most common scenarios for complex applications.

cloud computing, google, java

Google App Engine and why vendor honesty pays

December 6, 2010 onlyconnect 1 Comment

I’ve just attended a Cloudstock session on Google App Engine and new Google platform technologies – an introductory talk by Google’s Christian Schalk.

App Engine has been a subject of considerable debate recently, thanks to a blog post by Carlos Ble called Goodbye App Engine:

Choosing GAE as the platform four our project is a mistake which cost I estimate in about 15000€. Considering it’s been my money, it is a "bit" painful.

Ble’s points is that App Engine has many limitations. Since Google tends not to highlight these in its marketing, Ble discovered them as he went, causing frustrations and costly workarounds. In addition, it has not proved reliable:

Once you overcome all the limitations with your complex code, you are supposed to gain scalabilty for millions of users. After all, you are hosted by Google. This is the last big lie.

Since the last update they did in september 2010, we starting facing random 500 error codes that some days got the site down 60% of the time.

Ble has now partially retracted his post.

I am rewriting this post is because Patrick Chanezon (from Google), has added a kind and respectful comment to this post. Given the huge amount of traffic this post has generated (never expected nor wanted) I don’t want to damage the GAE project which can be a great platform in the future.

He is still not exactly positive, and adds:

I also don’t want to try Azure. The more experience I gain, the less I trust platforms/frameworks which code I can’t see.

Ble’s post is honest, but many of the issues are avoidable and arguably his main error was not to research the platform more thoroughly before than diving in. He blames the platform for issues that in some cases are implementation mistakes.

Still, here at Cloudstock I was interested to see if Schalk was going to mention any of these limitations or respond to Ble’s widely-read post. The answer is no – I got the impression that anything you can do in Java or Python, you can do on App Engine, with unlimited scalability thrown in.

My view is that it pays vendors to explain the “why not” as well as the “why” of using their platform. Otherwise there is a risk of disillusionment, and disillusioned customers are hard to win back.

cloud computing, professional, salesforce.com

Salesforce.com is the wrong kind of cloud says Oracle’s Larry Ellison

September 20, 2010 onlyconnect 3 Comments

Oracle CEO Larry Ellison took multiple jabs at Salesforce.com in the welcome keynote at OpenWorld yesterday.

He said it was old, not fault tolerant, not elastic, and built on a bad security model since all customers share the same application. “Elastic” in this context means able to scale on demand.

Ellison was introducing Oracle’s new cloud-in-a-box, the Exalogic Elastic Cloud. This features 30 servers and 360 cores packaged in a single cabinet. It is both a hardware and software product, using Oracle’s infiniband networking internally for fast communication and the Oracle VM for hosting virtual machines running either Oracle Linux or Solaris. Oracle is positioning Exalogic as the ideal machine for Java applications, especially if they use the Oracle WebLogic application server, and as a natural partner for the Exadata Database Machine.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Exalogic is that it uses the Amazon EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) API. This is also used by Eucalyptus, the open source cloud infrastructure adopted by Canonical for its Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud. With these major players adopting the Amazon API, you could almost call it as standard.

Ellison’s Exalogic cloud is a private cloud, of course, and although he described it as low maintenance it is nevertheless the customer’s responsibility to provide the site, the physical security and to take responsibility for keeping it up and running. Its elasticity is also open to question. It is elastic from the perspective of an application running on the system, presuming that there is spare capacity to run up some more VMs as needed. It is not elastic if you think of it as a single powerful server that will be eye-wateringly expensive; you pay for all of it even though you might not need all of it, and if your needs grow to exceed its capacity you have to buy another one – though Ellison claimed you could run the entire Facebook web layer on just a couple of Exalogics.

In terms of elasticity, there is actually an advantage in the Salesforce.com approach. If you share a single multi-tenanted application with others, then elasticity is measured by the ability of that application to scale on demand. Behind the scenes, new servers or virtual servers may come into play, but that is not something that need concern you. The Amazon approach is more hands-on, in that you have to work out how to spin up (or down) VMs as needed. In addition, running separate application instances for each customer means a larger burden of maintenance falling on the customer – which with a private cloud might mean an internal customer – rather than on the cloud provider.

In the end it is not a matter of right and wrong, more that the question of what is the best kind of cloud is multi-faceted. Do not believe all that you hear, whether the speaker is Oracle’s Ellison or Marc Benioff from Salesforce.com.

Incidentally, Salesforce.com runs on Oracle and Benioff is a former Oracle VP.

Postscript: as Dennis Howlett observes, the high capacity of Exalogic is actually a problem – he estimates that only 5% at most of Oracle’s customers could make use of such an expensive box. Oracle will address this by offering public cloud services, presumably sharing some of the same technology.

Tim Anderson's IT Writing

Tag Archives: salesforce.com

Tech Writing