Zend last week launched something called the Simple Cloud API simplecloud.org. It’s only in the early stages but has the goal of creating a set of APIs to allow PHP developers to use features of the cloud in a standard way. This means that PHP code written to work on one vendor’s cloud will work on another vendors cloud (as long as they are part of the simplecloud.org group). Along with Zend, Simple Cloud has the backing of several players in the cloud space including Rackspace, GoGrid, Microsoft and IBM. Interestingly, the Simple Cloud website is currently hosted on EC2 so maybe the group will be supporting Amazon’s cloud as well.

This partnership is definitely something that is needed. The last thing that developers need are a half dozen (or more) clouds, each different APIs than the others. At this point, the group is targeting 3 APIs: file storage, document storage and simple queues. The Simple Clould website has draft APIs for each of these areas. If you look at Amazon’s cloud, there would be a number of things that would not be covered by these APIs (cloudfront and simple as examples). So the group needs to move beyond the intial 3 APIs to really reach their stated goal of making PHP code portable from one cloud to another. Also, the group seems to only be focusing on PHP (which makes sense since Zend is driving things). Really though, the APIs should be available for all the key programming languages.

Still simplecloud.org seems to be a step in the right direction. Let’s hope that the group is able to create some momentum and keep pushing beyond the initial 3 APIs.