IBM, Microsoft Back Zend Open Cloud API
While cloudcomputing is at the peak of the hypecycle, a question many people ask is “which cloud should I choose ?” what they mean in most cases is that they’re afraid of being locked in a certain platform based on the fact that some of the interfaces are not standard simply because not all standards exist ..
Well today a big step towards standard is being set by some of the cloud vendors in this field. I am very glad to see Microsoft being there from the start ..
Zend Technologies' Simple API project provides a common API set from which developers may call application services.
A group of prominent cloud vendors has banded together behind an open source project that promises to make application services available across clouds. Zend Technologies, the supplier of the PHP scripting language, launched the Simple API project Tuesday, and IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) were among the first vendors to sign on.
"We're very excited to participate. This is a very important effort," said Vijay Rajagopalan, principal architect for Microsoft's interoperability strategy team, in an interview. Microsoft will supply the project with a PHP software development kit for its Azure cloud, which is due to become operative in the second half of November.
Simple API will seek to counteract the tendency of each cloud to have some proprietary parts, making it difficult for an application to work with services in more than one cloud at a time.
The Simple API is intended to provide a common API set from which developers may call application services, regardless of which cloud they reside in. Files generated by an application running in one cloud could be stored on Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN)'s S3, Rackspace's Cloud Files, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network, or Microsoft's Azure Windows blobs. Rackspace and Nirvanix are also members of the project.
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