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The Apache Software Foundation recently announced Apache Deltacloud v1.0, which provides several Web service APIs for interacting with cloud service providers in a unified, interoperable manner.
The Apache Deltacloud project comprises many implementations for the most popular clouds offerings and provides client libraries for a wide variety of languages. The project graduated from the Apache incubator program in October 2011.
ASF says Deltacloud contains a cloud abstraction API. The API works as a wrapper around a large number of clouds, abstracting their differences. For every provider there is a driver “speaking” cloud provider’s native API. It frees you from dealing with the particulars of each cloud’s API, ASF officials said.
“The release of version 1.0 is a logical step in the evolution of the project,” said David Lutterkort, vice president of Apache Deltacloud, in a statement. “The native Deltacloud API has reached a level of maturity that makes calling this release 1.0 very appropriate.”
Deltacloud provides the API server and drivers necessary for connecting to cloud providers. Deltacloud maintains long-term stability for scripts, tools and applications and backward compatibility across different versions. Using a single API Deltacloud enables management of resources in different clouds.
The Deltacloud server offers three different API frontends: a classic API, based on the API defined by the Deltacloud project itself; a frontend for the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface standard under development by the Distributed Management Task Force; and now a frontend for the API used by Amazon’s EC2.
“The EC2 frontend really just started as a ‘let’s see how hard this can be’ prototype – we found that it was actually quite easy to add that additional API to Deltacloud, Lutterkort added. The Deltacloud codebase is very well suited to translating between cloud API’s, making it possible for clients using one API to talk to clouds offering a completely different one. Deltacloud makes it possible for clients to use the EC2 API against a VMware vSphere installation or against OpenStack; similarly, it allows clients to use the CIMI API with Amazon’s Web Services. It goes a long way towards avoiding lock-in on the cloud API level.”