Saying that the developer experience is a high priority, cloud-hosting company Rackspace today announced it is making available Open Cloud SDKs to facilitate integration with the open-source services in its cloud, which is based on the OpenStack suite of services.
The first two SDKs will support Java and PHP, according to Wayne Walls, developer advocate at Rackspace. They will enable developers to use APIs to control the cloud services programmatically, in specific programming languages.
The Rackspace Cloud SDK for Java utilizes jclouds, an open-source Java library. “Developers can pull down the jclouds SDK, which is also on GitHub, and write the application once and run it on any cloud,” Walls said. “We’ve already merged our code into that project.” He noted that Rackspace developers will work in the jclouds community to help update and maintain code. The SDK supports Rackspace Cloud Server and Cloud Files (OpenStack Nova and OpenStack Swift, respectively).
For PHP developers, the Cloud SDK for PHP, leverages the php-opencloud library (developed by Rackspace), with support for Nova, Swift, Cloud Databases and preview access to Cloud Networks.
“This is one of the biggest steps Rackspace has taken in that realm,” Walls said. “We looked to see who’s hitting our cloud the most, and it’s Java, PHP, Python and Ruby.”
He noted that the company will add SDKs for those languages in the coming months. “We want developers to have the tools they want to build in our cloud.”
