Cloud Comparisons
The graphic below compares various cloud ecosystems and platforms. The question marks designate weak support for that particular capability. New cloud platforms will be added to this list over time.
Platform Features
DreamFactory has the unique capability to build applications that run in identical fashion on any cloud platform. This also allows us to compare different platforms in an “apples to apples” way. So it's pretty easy to conduct some basic speed tests for simple operations on various clouds. In each case the integration layer is written to be as fast as we can manage, and the test was conducted at various times to make sure that the results were reasonably consistent. For example, we have noticed that Salesforce has trouble on Monday morning, and Amazon Web Services is slow on Saturday night.
Performance Benchmarks (in seconds)
We compared creating 1000 database objects, then retrieving these objects with a simple filter, then retriving the objects with their ID values instead, then updating all 1000 objects, and lastly deleting them. All of these transactions were conducted from the DreamFactory Player and the appropriate DirectConnect library talking directly to the cloud, and the results were saved as they came in. Your milage might vary, and also the test itself could be a bit biased one way or the other depending on the number of objects or other factors. At any rate the results are provided below, all the times listed are in Seconds
As you can see the enterprise class services from salesforce.com and SQL Azure fare the best by far, they are also the most expensive. The two commodity services Amazon WS and Azure Tables are much slower, and also cheaper. Cisco WebEx Connect and Intuit Workplace fill the mid range. Azure Tables would have made an impressive showing except for the retrieve call. Below are some additional notes on the various platforms.
Salesforce.com
Salesforce is a cloud platform leader, with a great Web Services API, a nice Metadata API, and a host of other capabilities like force.com for customizing your salesforce org. On the downside salesforce is expensive and somewhat proprietary. Developers who want to write something for the AppExchange are often surprised to learn that only people with salesforce user licenses can use their app. Still, salesforce has solved lots of tough problems and has great advanced capabilities.
Amazon Web Sevices
AWS started the whole idea of providing raw services for IT many years ago. Unfortunately they never moved up the stack to provide raw services for Independent Software Vendors, which makes AWS more of a commodity than a platform. The big missing factory is an anchor tenant and a marketplace.
Microsoft Azure Tables
Towards the end of 2009 Microsoft released Azure Tables, which proved to be a great first attempt at a full featured table service. This offering avoids many of the unfortunate design problems that plagued competitive services from Google and Amazon. Azure Tables provides real user segmentation, generous size limits, good performance, reasonable cost, and an adequate query language. Azure Tables also requires some additional work to become a true cloud platform addressable from the client, check out our DirectConnect libraries to add this capability to your account.
Microsoft SQL Azure
Microsoft's SQL Azure service provides a dedicated 5, 10, or 50 GB SQL database on demand for the ultimate corporate power user. In our testing SQL Azure literally blew the competition away in terms of speed and performance. SQL Azure also requires some additional work to become a true cloud platform addressable from the client, check out our DirectConnect libraries to add this capability to your account.
After many press releases claiming to be some kind of cloud platform, you might be surprised that Google didn't make it into either table above. The problem is that Google doesn't actually offer any services that developers can use to build their own applications. But hope springs eternal: there is still time for Google to get in the cloud platform game.
Intuit Workplace
Intuit successfully repositioned their QuickBase product as a cloud platform in 2006. Then they added Intuit Data Services (IDS) to expose QuickBooks data to the cloud. The QuickBooks client desktop product can automatically synchronize your data, and coming up pretty soon is the QuickBooks online product, which should offer more seamless interaction for online delivery and partner applications. But can a client software company reposition themselves as a cloud leader? Will small business adopt cloud platforms like larger enterprises? At any rate Intuit has a very good technical platform and a superior online marketplace.
Cisco Webex Connect
Connect is a platform built around enterprise class instant messaging, online collaboration, and WebEx meetings. You can run your applications as widgets in user workspaces and start meetings or chat from there. The platform has great potential but has suffered from a lack of emphasis over at Cisco. There are also some performance problems in the workspaces that need to be fixed.