In an effort to eliminate this inconvenience several companies (among them Zend, Microsoft, and IBM) have banded together to create the Simple Cloud API. The Simple Cloud API offers a unified interface for document storage, file storage, and simple queue services, and currently supports several of the most popular service vendors, including Amazon, Windows Azure, and Nirvanix. Zend has already moved quickly to incorporate support for Simple Cloud into the Zend Framework, greatly reducing the barriers and complexity involved in moving from one service to another, or using multiple vendors within the same application.

They show how to use the Zend_Cloud component to make a connection to an Amazon S3 instance via the Simple Cloud unified interface. They push a simple file (book.txt) up to the instance and the code to pull it back down. There's also a bit of code showing how to set a default bucket name with the factory method (as shown with a Windows Azure instance instead).

The Simple Cloud API brings cloud technologies to PHP and the PHPilosophy to the cloud, starting with common interfaces for three cloud application services: file Storage Services, document Storage Services, simple Queue Services. You can start writing scalable, highly available, and resilient cloud applications that are portable across all major cloud vendors today.

Kevin's four part series consists of posts covering:

• SimpleCloud Part 1 - Setting the Stage
• SimpleCloud Part 2 - The Job Manager
• SimpleCloud Part 3 - The Abstract Job
• SimpleCloud Part 4 - Storage

I've been playing with Zend's SimpleCloud API for the webcast that I'm doing with Zend today. I started with the Zend Framework Quickstart tutorial but changed out the backend to hit the Azure Tables and such (well kinda - I used Zend Studio 8 Beta 2 and didn't use the ZF tool but I still created a little guestbook). I'm going to expand this example to include blob storage and queues as well in the near future but at the moment, I'm just going to hit the Azure Tables.

He uses the Zend Framework CE, Zend Studio Beta, the Windows Azure SDK and the Windows Azure 4 Eclipse plugin to interface directly with the Azure instance. He shows how to create the project (complete with screenshots), map the IIS document root directory to the Azure instance (a Virtual Directory) and build the application. All of the code and table structures needed are included with the end result looking something like this.

It's been over six months since the initial code release of the SimpleCloud API, and the code has come a long way since then: thanks to the efforts of Stas, Wil, and our partners, we now have a solid, well-tested, documented code base that shows off integration with Amazon, Windows Azure, and Nirvanix.

You can dowload the latest release here but keep in mind that the API has the possibility to change since this release isn't a final version. Bugs that are found can be entered into the bug tracker.

Developing "cloud-native" applications? Soon there'll be an abstraction layer for that too. [...] Sounds great, right? Not so much. As Chief Architect of a PHP-based "cloud-native" application that's handling hundreds of millions of requests per month, there's no way I'd consider using Simple Cloud. Here are five reasons why you shouldn't either.

His reasons are pretty simple ones - leaky abstractions, lowest common denominator calls the shots, the important groups (leaders) don't always get involved, creating a native option isn't that hard and, face it, you'll never make the move over because of the work level and uncertainty involved.

If you'd like to find out more about what he's talking about, check out this site for more information on Simple Cloud.

The Simple Cloud API project empowers developers to use one interface to interact with the cloud services offered by different vendors. These vendors are all contributing to this open source project, making sure the Simple Cloud API "fits like a glove" on top of their service.

The API lets you work with things like Windows Azure blobs, Amazon S3, Amazon's SimpleDB and Rackspace Cloud Files. Maarten includes a bit of sample code using the new Zend_Cloud components of the Zend Framework to make a connection to Windows Azure and store/retrieve an item to and from the service. You can find out more about the interface and what all it supports on the Simple Cloud website.