The Apache Foundation has announced on May 25th that it has graduated Libcloud from Incubator status to a Top-Level Project. Libcloud represents a Python library that introduces a vendor-neutral interface to proprietary APIs of various cloud providers. As a Top-Level-Project the solution will get much more awareness and support from the open-source community in the future. At the same time Apache Libcloud has been promoted to a Top-Level-Project, the new version 0.5 has been released.
Originally, Libcloud was created by developers around Alex Polvi, CEO and cofounder of CloudKick. The company is focusing on Cloud management and has been recently acquired by Rackspace. It is essential for a cloud management company to manage different cloud solutions provided by different providers. This, however, requires either the implementation of specialized libraries for each cloud technology, or alternatively, a vendor-neutral approach. The later solution is what Libcloud tries to provide, thus also enabling the programmatic integration of different clouds, so-called Multi-Clouds. In 2009, the Apache Foundation accepted Libcloud as an Incubator Project.
According to the Libcloud development team the solution provides
a vendor-neutral interface to cloud provider APIs. The current version of Apache Libcloud includes backend drivers for more than twenty leading providers including Amazon EC2, Rackspace Cloud, GoGrid and Linode. Graduation signifies that both the Apache Libcloud product and community have been well-governed under the Foundation’s meritocratic, consensus-driven process and principles.
In the library developers will find methods like list, create, or destroy for managing cloud resources among other functionality. The generic approach reminds of database assess layers hat provide similar wrappers for different persistence providers. Protocols like SSL are supported to allow a secure access to the available cloud resources.
Interestingly, another Apache Incubator Project, Deltacloud, provides a similar but REST- und Ruby-based solution, originally initiated by Red Hat.