When should one use the following: Amazon EC2, Google App Engine, Microsoft Azure and Salesforce.com?

Question

I am asking this in very general sense. Both from cloud provider and cloud consumer\'s perspective. Also the question is not for any specific kind of application (in fact the in

Answer 1

My cloud experience is currently limited to Salesforce.com

For standard business operations and automation it provides a significant number of features that allow us to get apps up and running very quickly. We are particularly benefitting from the following:

• Security (Administrators can control access to objects and fields)
• Workflow & Approvals
• Automatic UI generation
• Built in reporting and dashboards
• Entire system (including our custom changes) is accessible via web services
• Ability to make the data in the system available through public sites (e.g. eCommerce)
• Large library of third party apps to solve standard problems

The platform does NOT solve every problem.

I would not use the platform to model a nuclear power station or build the next twitter.