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May Force.com Not Be With You
Posted by Mike Gualtieri on August 23, 2011
Lack Of Infrastructure Portability Is A Showstopper For Me
Salesforce.com bills Force.com as "The leading cloud platform for business apps." It is definitely not for me, though. The showstopper: infrastructure portability. If I develop an application using the Apex programming language, I can only run in the Force.com "cloud" infrastructure.
Don't Lock Me In
Q: What is worse than being locked-in to a particular operating system?
A: Being locked-in to hardware!
In The Era Of Cloud Computing, Infrastructure Portability (IP) Is A Key Requirement For Application Developers
Unless there is a compelling reason to justify hardware lock-in, make sure you choose a cloud development platform that offers infrastructure portability; otherwise, your app will be like a one-cable-television-company town.
Bottom line: Your intellectual property (IP) should have infrastructure portability (IP).
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Platform-as-a-service can be dangerous if...
Platform-as-a-service can be dangerous if the application you design and write can only be run on one companies infrastructure. There are other cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure, VMWare, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace, IBM that will are pure infrastructure.
Cloud infrastructure portability made simple
I completely agree - your point is a big reason why we created the unique Cloud portal environment called Progress Arcade (http://arcade.progress.com), which goes live on Sept 1, 2011. I covered the basics in my blog post, “Welcome to the Cloud” (http://bit.ly/qpuKTx). In particular, thanks to our partnership with the folks at RightScale, Arcade can support multiple Cloud infrastructure vendors, preventing the lock-in that you described. But the real beauty of Arcade is that it was designed and built to be easy-to-use, flexible, and expandable to support our application development community now and in the future. While some like to think in terms of “no software,” I prefer to think about the bigger picture and focus on “no limits.”
What ever happened to VMForce?
I heard about it at Cloudforce London last year. It seemed like a good way to put java apps on force.com. Did it just disappear?
http://www.vmware.com/products/vcloud/vmforce/
VMForce is dead
http://siliconangle.com/blog/2011/09/01/vmforce-is-dead-the-platform-riv...