Force.com for Amazon Web Services

Today at Dreamforce 2008 Salesforce.com and Amazon Web Services announced Force.com for Amazon Web Services, which is a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to build Salesforce applications that are partly hosted on Amazon Web Services. More information is also available on our Partner Page. If you are looking for the Amazon Machine Image (AMI), in Amazon's catalog of public AMIs, it's ami-e431d58d. This is the virtual server with the Salesforce toolkit pre-installed.

For example, it’s now easy to build a Salesforce application that stores images or documents in Amazon S3, or to run part of the application on Amazon EC2 using PHP. The toolkit has been packaged up as an EC2 AMI which you can get here    .

There are already a number of such applications listed in Salesforce's AppExchange, created before the toolkit became available. Here's a few examples:

Appirio Cloud Storage for Salesforce allows users to economically store unlimited numbers of files in Amazon S3 through the Salesforce interface. According to the product description, "It creates a Custom File Object in Salesforce that contains the name, description and other information including a secure link to the actual document. The end user still uploads and retrieves documents the same way they do today."

DoX for AppExchange allowing users to locate and share documents regardless of where they are stored--and one of those supported locations is Amaozn S3.

FTP Attachments is another example of this "store anywhere" paradigm, and once again Amazon S3 is one of the supported locations.

Imagine how much easier integrated tools make developer innovation!

If you'll be at Dreamforce, I'll be participating in a panel discussion titled "Clear the Cloud: How, When, and If Your Organization Should Leverage Cloud Services" today (November 3) from 11:30am - 12:30pm. In addition, we'll have a stand in Salesforce's pavillion in the exhibit hall. Love to meet you if you are able to stop by.

-- Mike