>>>>Have you seen this?
>>>>
>>>>http://www.foxincloud.com/index.php
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>Anyone using Amazon's cloud service to host a VFP application? where the VFP app is a pay-as-you-go SAAS offering for multiple clients?
>>>
>>>Thanks Craig. I have. I went to the last SWFox. Great show, and FIC looked interesting. Thierry was kind enough to walk me thru it. At the moment, just looking for input on running a VFP app on Amazon's cloud hosting options.
>>
>>PMFJI and for very naive question. How would VFP app work in a cloud? From Rick Strahl's message it would like having a VM box somewhere in the "cloud". But what I don't understand is, if the VM is not on the customer LAN, how do users load VFP application?
>
>There are a few options. Probably the simplest, which would require zero changes to the VFP app, would be to configure the VM as a Terminal Server. Remote customers would connect to the TS (probably through a VPN for security) and run the app there.
>
>If customers connect via a VPN the VM server would appear as a host on the customer's "local network" so it would be possible to map drive letter(s) to file share(s) on the VM. However, direct access to VFP data tables is likely to be too slow to be usable. For many people a "fast" Internet connection is ~10Mbit/sec download and maybe 0.5 - 1.0Mbit/sec upload. Most consumer and small office LAN network gear is 1000Mbit/sec (i.e. gigabit), bidirectional, with much lower latency.
>
>If the VFP app uses a RDBMS backend there are more options. Customers could still connect via VPN, run a VFP EXE locally which sends queries and gets responses back from the remote server through the VPN. The server in the VM would only have to host the database server.
>
>The other main option is to supply the SaaS as a web application. One suboption here would be to set up the VM as a web host that can respond to web service-style requests, and have a customer-local VFP app that can consume those web services. Another would be to re-architect the VFP app as a web app (WC or some other technology) and then set up a web server in the VM.

Thank you very much for the detailed answer.