AWS Lambda vs. Salesforce Revenue Cloud

Lambda excels at event-driven, short-lived tasks, such as processing files or building simple APIs. However, it's less ideal for long-running, computationally intensive, or applications that rely on carrying the state between jobs. Cold starts and constant load can easily balloon the costs.

Incentivized

What I like best is the ease of use to be able to track all opportunities and quotes in my daily sales tracker I also like the fact that you can reorganize the view for your opportunities. For instance, it is very similar to a spreadsheet where you can filter them by date, dollar amount, name, and several other ways. I found this to be less appropriate when we have to do multiple roles while assigning one task to multiple users. Column resizing within the Quote Line Editor is not supported in the Salesforce mobile app.

• No provisioning required - we don't have to pay anything upfront
• Serverless deployment - it gets executed only when request comes and we pay only for the time the request is getting executed
• Integrates well with AWS CloudWatch triggers so it is easy to setup scheduled tasks like cron jobs

Incentivized

• Salesforce CPQ easily maps to standard and custom fields within the opportunity in SFDC, allowing you to avoid time spent duplicating effort or copying and pasting deal criteria.
• Salesforce CPQ connects directly to pre-determined price book, making it very easy to provide a proposal based on standard cost and/or add discounts to standard cost and reflect those reductions on the order form as appropriate.
• Salesforce CPQ provides the ability for administrators to configure workflows for approval based on certain discount %'s on the standard cost, offering a quick and easy way to route automatically through the organization for approval.

Incentivized

• Developing test cases for Lambda functions can be difficult. For functions that require some sort of input it can be tough to develop the proper payload and event for a test.
• For the uninitiated, deploying functions with Infrastructure as Code tools can be a challenging undertaking.
• Logging the output of a function feels disjointed from running the function in the console. A tighter integration with operational logging would be appreciated, perhaps being able to view function logs from the Lambda console instead of having to navigate over to CloudWatch.
• Sometimes its difficult to determine the correct permissions needed for Lambda execution from other AWS services.

Incentivized

• Our Salesforce is very messy, which tells me it's not super easy to clean up.
• I always have a really hard time removing a contacts from an account - it seems like you can't simply remove the relationship so we have lots of people named DO NOT CONTACT or things of that nature.
• Sometimes when saving it doesn't seem like things actually save.

Incentivized

The company is very easy to work with and is growing by leaps and bounds. We do not anticipate switching vendors anytime in the near future

I give it a seven is usability because it's AWS. Their UI's are always clunkier than the competition and their documentation is rather cumbersome. There's SO MUCH to dig through and it's a gamble if you actually end up finding the corresponding info if it will actually help. Like I said before, going to google with a specific problem is likely a better route because AWS is quite ubiquitous and chances are you're not the first to encounter the problem. That being said, using SAM (Serverless application model) and it's SAM Local environment makes running local instances of your Lambdas in dev environments painless and quite fun. Using Nodejs + Lambda + SAM Local + VS Code debugger = AWESOME.

Incentivized

After the initial set up, end users who are not the most tech savy are generally finding it easy to navigate

Amazon consistently provides comprehensive and easy-to-parse documentation of all AWS features and services. Most development team members find what they need with a quick internet search of the AWS documentation available online. If you need advanced support, though, you might need to engage an AWS engineer, and that could be an unexpected (or unwelcome) expense.

Incentivized

There have been some issues with multi-year pricing of certain products and services which we have been assured will be resolved but I guess are still underway, the support team apart from this has not been needed much and in the rare scenarios, it has been needed the resolutions of conflicts has been prompt and quick, so the overall support would have my high regards for being so helpful and customer-oriented so as to assure good performance of their toolset and customer satisfaction.

Incentivized

AWS Lambda is good for short running functions, and ideally in response to events within AWS. Google App Engine is a more robust environment which can have complex code running for long periods of time, and across more than one instance of hardware. Google App Engine allows for both front-end and back-end infrastructure, while AWS Lambda is only for small back-end functions

Incentivized

There is no comparison to a fully functional instance of CPQ. Nothing comes close due to the amount of customization and ease of use that CPQ offers once it's fully built out. Other solutions may be easier to build or administer, but for the users and business needs, CPQ is the best solution possible.

Incentivized

• Positive - Only paying for when code is run, unlike virtual machines where you pay always regardless of processing power usage.
• Positive - Scalability and accommodating larger amounts of demand is much cheaper. Instead of scaling up virtual machines and increasing the prices you pay for that, you are just increasing the number of times your lambda function is run.
• Negative - Debugging/troubleshooting, and developing for lambda functions take a bit more time to get used to, and migrating code from virtual machines and normal processes to Lambda functions can take a bit of time.

Incentivized

• Salesforce CPQ has helped a lot with overall visibility to the quote to order process. Reps have more insight into the business and the business has more insight into Sales Rep interactions. This makes troubleshooting issues much easier.
• Our reporting capabilities have improved immensely. The ability to easily create fields allows you to capture new data points very easily.
• Communication in Salesforce CPQ and Salesforce, in general, is a big improvement for our business. The ability to have a chatter feed on any object is very helpful. This can also be used for feed tracking to give some basic change management controls/history.

Incentivized