On PHPBuilder.com today there's a new tutorial looking at how you can use the Simple Cloud technology that Zend offers directly from your Zend Framework application with the help of the Zend_Cloud component.

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).