As promised, Salesforce’s business software is now running live on Amazon Web Services’ Canadian data facilities near Montreal.
Salesforce (CRM), which has previously run its software from data centers it manages, late last year said the software would also be offered from Amazon’s central Canada region starting in mid-2017 and eventually other Amazon regions including Australia. This is all part of the company’s growing partnership with AWS, announced earlier in 2016.
Amazon (AMZN) opened its Montreal cloud facilities in December. Workday (WDAY), another large business software provider, has also said it will run its applications from this Canadian facility.
Related: Welcome to the era of Data Center Consolidation
Amazon and public cloud rivals Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) are adding data centers around the world at a fast clip, partly to put the computing capabilities closer to local customers, and partly to be able to assure national governments that data that needs to stay in-country will do so.
And Canada, like the U.K. And Germany, mandates that some government organizations, keep their data within Canada—not in an AWS or Microsoft data center in the U.S. Or elsewhere.
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In December, Salesforce co-founder Parker Harris told Coins2Day that the company did some fairly extensive engineering work to ensure that its technology will run on AWS infrastructure. Salesforce, for example, uses Oracle (ORCL) databases running on what IT pros call “bare metal” servers. To put those databases on Amazon’s virtualized servers was not trivial work. Virtualization is a server software layer that enables more applications to share the same hardware.
That re-engineering work means Salesforce’s core software is no longer married to the company’s traditional data center infrastructure. Theoretically, the company could move all of its software to the public cloud, although Harris said at the time that there were no plans to do so.