The Simple Cloud API will enable developers to invoke cloud services in a common way across cloud providers. Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, CTO of IBM Cloud Computing
I’ve been asked on several occasions whether the Simple Cloud API is an alternative to deltacloud. Because deltacloud focuses on elastic cloud services such as EC2 and Rackspace Servers while the Simple Cloud API provides a common interface for services that are used at application runtime, such as SimpleDB and Azure Queue Storage.
Reply by Peter on Nov 4, 2009
Simple Cloud and deltaCloud are similar but different. They are similar in that they are both trying to provide a single API that can be used to access various vendor's cloud functionality. But, they go about it in a differenty way. Simple Cloud API provides higher level PHP APIs while deltaCloud provides a lower level REST API. Also, as you pointed out, deltaCloud focuses on elastic cloud services where Simple Cloud focuses on application services like storage.
Reply by Wil Sinclair on Nov 4, 2009
I see deltacloud as largely complementary to the Simple Cloud API. As far as I understand, there are language bindings to deltacloud with Ruby already available. I don't think the PHP binding is available yet, although any determined contributor could probably change that. :) In any case, AFAIK it's not a pure PHP library. Red Hat makes the deltacloud REST API available to remote clients, and I'm wondering if the Simple Cloud API should expose a remote interface, too. It probably wouldn't be REST, unless we changed the API to be more entity-oriented. But it's easy to imagine an XML-RPC or SOAP interface that could be automatically generated against the Simple Cloud API. We do this elsewhere in ZF. What do you think? ,Wil
Reply by Will Kiefer on Nov 10, 2009
Are you intending to integrate with the SMEStorage multi-cloud API ? (http://code.google.com/p/smestorage/). This seems a very fully featured API and seems to overlay an abstraction on top of clouds that gives you a file system with services.
Reply by Wil Sinclair on Nov 10, 2009
I haven't had a chance to install and play around with it, but my understanding is that SMEStorage provides a file system abstraction on top of storage services. We, on the other hand, are trying to expose the common features of the services without adding new functionality. Maybe SMEStorage could have an adapter for the Simple Cloud API? Maybe the other way around? ,Wil