What's happening in compute cloud abstraction APIs

This blog presents a status update of 5 popular open source projects supporting compute cloud portability.

Developers who need cloud resources, like on-demand Linux VMs, have a lot of choices today. They choose which cloud they wish to use, and also how they wish to access it. Some write code that connects to the API presented by the cloud itself, like the EC2 Query API by Amazon. Such developers have a hard time moving to another cloud, as the next cloud's API may be wildly different then the one they moving from. When this is the case, the developer must learn a new API and break all the assumptions in their codebase that rely on the prior. For some, this level of effort discourages trying another cloud at all, regardless of financial or service-level benefit.

There is another way.

Many open source projects solve the common problems of compute-cloud portability. Some favor a specific language and facilitate embedded use. Others provide a service any language can use. Some do both! While these projects have different angles, and are written in different languages, they do work together towards moving the industry forward. This is exemplified through cross-project code commits and meetups such as cloudhackers. Through this shared experience, these projects cover design and implementation pitfalls a casual developer might not expect, allowing them to focus on the task at hand.

Below, you'll find updates on 5 different open source libraries that offer compute cloud abstraction in various languages. I've kept the format brief and the update list short intentionally. Please do dig deeper and get involved in the projects you find useful.

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Updates in alphabetical order
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Dasein Cloud - http://dasein-cloud.sourceforge.net
set of Java interfaces for accessing common cloud services

*News*
new feature: support for virtualized load balancers across all clouds supporting load balancers
coming soon: support for AWS auto-scaling
coming soon: deeper Azure integration and GoGrid support

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Deltacloud - http://deltacloud.org/
Ruby and ReST API across compute clouds and hypervisors

*News*
new feature: hardware profiles abstraction cover very static cases, like EC2, and also very dynamic cases, like Rimu
new tool: Deltacloud Aggregator - lays policy across multiple deltaclouds like which VMs can run externally

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fog - http://github.com/geemus/fog
provider and abstraction level API across compute and storage, written in Ruby

*News*
new provider: SliceHost
coming soon: Terremark vCloud support

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jclouds - http://code.google.com/p/jclouds/
provider and abstraction level API across compute and storage, written in Java

*News*
new feature: node templates normalize size, image, and location across compute clouds.
new tool: hugoduncan/pallet uses chef, crane, and jclouds to provision sets of nodes

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libcloud - http://incubator.apache.org/libcloud/downloads.html
unified access to over 10 compute clouds, written in python

*News*
official release: v0.2.0 is now available for download
new tool: socket service allows you to call libcloud from any language
new tool: cli wrapper exposes libcloud to the shell prompt

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