Finally, with Apache Libcloud, using multiple cloud services is to soon become easy, simplified and faster. Cloud Interoperability is never an easy affair, but Apache Libcloud set out to deliver on this. Between its incubation stage in 2009 and 2011 it has achieved full-fledged project status. Truly appreciate efforts and focus of Libcloud team and community!
Called the standardization tool for real time cloud interoperability
The Apache Software Foundations cloud product called the Apache Libcloud is a Python based library standardisation for multiple cloud provider APIs. What the libcloud does is, to provide the users with a standard interface for the innumerable cloud services offered on a variety of platforms. This gives users three cloud resources to management – cloud servers, cloud storage and load balancers. It is available as Apache License Version 2 and can be downloaded here.
The growth of Libcloud
Begun as CloudKick in summer of 2009, the development team proposed to move to the apache Software foundation immediately after its first release and open sourcing the library of the project. With the graduation of Libcloud to project, the Incubation mentor and the Apache Software Foundation VP, Anthony Elder is all enthusiasm about the milestone achievement. He is confident of Lib cloud’s agility to manage across platforms and multiple service providers for seamless end-user experience.
Cloud Management to become easy
Presently there are close to twenty cloud platforms such as EC2, Eucalyptus, Rackspace, IBM Cloud and Linode and Linclouds graduation will soon offer capabilities for easy management of services for users. They will no longer be limited by provider platforms and will instead have smooth interoperability that only speaks for better and more sophisticated cloud managers for tomorrow.
Though begun as a cloud computing functionality by its graduation day, Lincloud has become a powerful support project for cloud storage and load balancing. These are to cloud-critical drivers that are likely to become defining parameters of cloud computing standards.
An incubating project becomes a project only if it has developed a well governed community following the apache Foundation’s principles and processes. This also saw the release of Version 0.5.0 of Libcloud.
It is largely used in production environments including Server Density and OOI Cyber Infrastructure. It continues to be part of the Cloudkick project and the co-founder/developer Alex Polvi, is proud of the Libcloud success and wishes that it will become the defining cloud framework.
What is attracting developers to Libcloud is that it is a client library for Python. With developers and Python being synonymous and given the challenges of coding for cloud environments the hands-on Libcloud is growing by the day. Though a Java implementation is available, as it supports fewer back-end services, the Python tribe is growing by the day.
A similar project that is attracting attention is the Deltacloud initially Red Hat-based. How it handles multiple cloud interfacing is different on the REST API and is multi-lingua and multi-application project.
