OK, a lot of you guys have noticed that I’ve been uncharacteristically silent for the past month or so. Now I can finally start talking about it- the Simple Cloud API has launched at http://www.simplecloud.org.
This API gives PHP developers one interface to code to for what we call ‘cloud application services’. These are runtime application services like nosql databases, storage, and simple queues. These services make it easier to write ‘cloud native’ applications that can take full advantage of the cloud’s promises of scalability and high-availability. I’ve found myself saying this a lot lately: “What’s the point of an infinitely scaling compute cloud when your applications can’t scale with it?”
We expect to be adding more of these services to the API as vendors roll them out. Possible services include email, session management, single sign on, etc. I can go on and on, but why don’t we let the vendors figure out what their customers need and vote with adoption? In any case, once such a service hits critical mass, the Simple Cloud API will have you covered.
The Simple Cloud API will be delivered as a new Zend Framework component called Zend_Cloud. The code will be available *very* soon.
So, why didn’t we do elastic compute cloud services in this first version of the API? That deserves a blog post of its own. 
,Wil
