Zend Teams with IBM, Microsoft, Rackspace for Open Source Cloud Initiative

Zend Technologies, a provider of products and services for developing, deploying, and managing PHP applications, launched the Simple API for Cloud Application Services project, a new open source initiative that allows developers to use common application services in the cloud, while enabling them to unlock features available from individual providers.

The project aims to facilitate the development of cloud applications that can access services on all major cloud platforms. Zend, IBM, Microsoft, Nirvanix, Rackspace and GoGrid are co-founding contributors to this community project.

Zend explained that the Simple Cloud API project empowers developers to use one interface to interact with a variety of cloud application services, enabling them to more easily access new technologies from cloud vendors. The first deliverables will include interfaces for file storage, document database, and simple queue services from platforms like Amazon Web Services, Windows Azure, Nirvanix Storage Delivery Network and Rackspace Cloud Files. As a result, developers can deploy software applications to access services in these environments without making time consuming and expensive changes to their source code.

"Cloud computing offers irresistible value to enterprises of all sizes, but the lack of portability across cloud application services for even the most basic operations has been an impediment to broader adoption of cloud services," said Andi Gutmans, CEO at Zend Technologies. "The Simple Cloud API combines the benefits of open source community processes with the active participation of the cloud vendors themselves.

"With early participation and support from industry leaders and the Zend Framework community, we anticipate that this important project will continue to grow, serving a wide range of application developers and businesses building modern Web applications for the cloud."

The Simple Cloud API project is designed to encourage widespread participation and contributions from the open source community, resulting in the availability of Simple Cloud API adapters for virtually all major cloud providers.

Dr. Kristof Kloeckner, CTO of IBM Cloud Computing, said, "The Simple Cloud API will enable developers to invoke cloud services in a common way across cloud providers. This can significantly reduce the costs for application development and provide customer choice. To that end, IBM will be contributing adapters for IBM's cloud service interfaces, as well as adapters to IBM's data storage products, allowing developers to easily switch between public clouds, private clouds and traditional data center environments."

Lew Moorman, Chief Strategy Officer and President of the Rackspace Cloud, said, "We're proud to be part of any initiative that delivers more value to developers in the cloud. Our contributions to the Simple Cloud API are part of our ongoing effort to bring the unique value of open source software to the cloud. Many of our customers use PHP as their Web application language of choice, and we believe that these developers should be able to choose which cloud services are the best fit for them through interfaces that they can help define."

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