EC2 vs VMforce

“Cloud computing” has replaced “Web 2.0″ and “social networking” as the latest buzz phrase. Today, every other company or organization is gearing itself to move onto the cloud. Getting onto the cloud is itself a big deal but what is more challenging is to decide on which cloud one should go to. Today, the three most impactful companies providing cloud services are Amazon (EC2), Salesforce and Microsoft (Azure). Other than this, VMforce, the first enterprise cloud computing service for java developers, is grabbing significant attention in the market.

Amazon’s EC2 is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution where customers can consume a generic server resource in the cloud. It still requires customers to install and manage an application stack including the application server, database, and other middleware elements. On the other hand, VMforce is a full Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution where the customer doesn’t need to worry about installing and managing the middleware and application stack. All that ‘plumbing’ is done as a service. EC2 pricing is per instance-hour consumed for each instance type and varies based on several different factors. Pricing for VMforce will be announced closer to its release date.

EC2 (Amazon):

Amazon’s EC2 is a cloud computing service that allows users to deploy and run their applications on rented virtual computers. Users can boot what are called Amazon Machine Images and create an instance, also known as a virtual machine, and pay for the amount of computing power they need by the hour. EC2 is particularly well suited for applications that experience hourly, daily, or weekly variability in usage. Below are some of its main features:

VMforce (SalesForce and VMWare):

VMforce is the shared vision of Salesforce.com and VMware. With VMforce, the customer focuses on the application logic and leaves the rest to VMware and Salesforce.com.  VMforce is aimed at SaaS and Web services developers. The major components of VMforce are VMware’s Spring platform — and its community of Java developers — and Salesforce.com’s Force.com platform.

Below is the table with brief comparison between the two:

Amazon Ec2	VMforce
IaaS	PaaS
Virtual services in the cloud	Complete platform as a service
Generic Server Images	Complete development service
Self-assembly & management of stack	Automatic stack management
Self-managed database	Database as a service
Self-managed scalability	Automatic scalability
AWS Services	Chatter services

You can download this file here for detailed features of EC2 and VMforce.