If the PHP programming language is to live on in clouds as well as data centers, applications written in PHP are going to have to be able to flow not only between data centers and their internal server stacks (we are apparently calling these private clouds these days) and external utility computing providers (these are now called public or semi-private clouds), but also around different clouds.
To that end, last week Zend Technologies, the commercial entity behind the open source PHP language and runtime environment, teamed up with IBM, Microsoft, and a couple of cloud providers to launch the Simple API Cloud Application Services project, or Simple Cloud API.
The idea that the Simple Cloud API proponents are proposing is simple, and is sure to bring a smile to the face of an AS/400 enthusiast: to virtualize and abstract the various differences in storage and runtime services that different clouds employ so programmers can just talk to a common API that in turn sorts out the differences so the PHP applications just run, whether they are on local hardware or on external clouds like Amazon’s EC2, Microsoft’s Azure, or Rackspace’s Cloud Files.
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