This article is more than 1 year old

Two weeks ago Salesforce had an outage. Now it's outsourced to AWS

International expansion to rely on Jeff B's cut price bit barns

Fresh from its embarrassing data loss incident in North America, Salesforce has announced it will start to run some of it software in Amazon Web Services.

Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, App Cloud, Community Cloud, Analytics Cloud and more will soon run in AWS bit barns. Heroku, Marketing Cloud Social Studio, SalesforceIQ, and the recently announced Salesforce IoT Cloud already reside inside Crazy Jeff's Cut Price Bit Barns.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff's canned statement sees him declare “There is no public cloud infrastructure provider that is more sophisticated or has more robust enterprise capabilities for supporting the needs of our growing global customer base.”

Which is hard to contend, if only because AWS is the market leader in a young field.

AWS has issued a humblebrag in response to the effect that it is very happy indeed to have scored the gig.

As Salesforce itself discovered during the outage of its NA14 instance earlier this month, even exhaustive efforts to harden a data centre can trip on tiny obstacles. Software-as-a-service outfits also tend to like their outposts to be lean, sales-driven affairs as the mucky business of running infrastructure is not cheap or pleasant.

Moving to AWS for new sites therefore makes a lot of sense for Salesforce.

AWS is also in the infrastructure business, at scale, in lots of places.

Which doesn't really explain why Salesforce has also increased its prices for UK users to higher levels than it charges in the USA.

One more wrinkle: around the world, cloud titans have sometimes partnered with local players. In Australia, for example, Microsoft's Azure is thought to be housed by local player NextDC while AWS sometimes bunks at Equinix. Salesforce signing a single global AWS deal looks bad news for comparable local players, although plenty of opportunity remains in this cloud caper for a while yet. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like