I had the great fortune of presenting to several different groups a couple of weeks ago on IDV’s presence and thoughts on Microsoft’s Windows Azure, the cloud platform for off-premise computing and data storage.  VisualFusion.cloudapp.net is the example application we have running on Azure and we have talked about it in this blog before.

David Chappell was the keynote speaker and offered an independent view of Azure versus other competition.  His take on which was right for you distilled it down into a question of need.  Each competing offering has a fairly focused target market, so depending upon what your needs are, it should be relatively straight-forward to figure out which platform to choose.

Here is a broad-brush comparison of each, based on what your need may be:

Google App Engine

This platform is geared for Web 2.0 apps.  Google as a company benefits from anything that increases web traffic in general, so a platform designed for consumer web apps makes a lot of sense for them.  This platform is good for start-ups looking to fail fast or scale fast, but it lacks most of the tool sets that enterprises typically rely on.

Force.com

Salesforce.com’s platform is for data-driven enterprise apps.  David likened it to “Access in the Cloud” (as in Access database).  You can get your app up quickly, it has cool tools to leverage, and you can bypass your IT department if you like.  The down side is absolute lock in.  You cannot port an app out of Force into anything else if the desire or need arises.

Amazon EC2

This platform offers a VM for each app, and you have full control of the “box”.  If you need admin access to your enterprise app, then this may be the only way to go (other than traditional hosting).  So, you get both the benefits and burdens of maintaining the VM yourself.

Traditional Hosting Model

Not a cloud platform in the sense that the others are, but definitely an alternative to consider.  You can expect cheaper resource costs than the cloud platforms, but probably more admin costs.  Big downsides are the lead time needed to spawn up a new app and the number of months/years you have to commit to, which both greatly limit your agility and flexibility.

Microsoft’s Windows Azure

Microsoft’s cloud platform is great for apps that need massive scale, or have variable loads (even heavy day/night discrepancies), or have unpredictable/very short life cycles, or may port from on-prem to the cloud or vice versa, etc.  You can grow and shrink resources/commitments very quickly with high reliability.  The biggest downside is that you don’t have access to the VM itself, so you can’t admin an individual instance of your app.

Visual Fusion’s future in the cloud…

Many Visual Fusion customers already have cloud data intermingled with organizational, on-premise content in the applications they’ve built with Visual Fusion.  Adding cloud-appropriate services—perhaps including app dev capabilities—is the next logical step.  Bypassing the VF install on-prem would be a great value-add for many.  The Azure model fits the mashup and rapid app development capabilities of Visual Fusion very well.  Similarly, the .NET framework underpinnings mean that porting VF to Azure is a straight-forward and logical choice.  We have yet to determine what exactly Visual Fusion on Azure will look like, but we know it fits right in line with the Visual Fusion tenants of empowerment, flexibility, and agility.