CloudBridge: a Simple Cross-Cloud Python Library.

Abstract

With clouds becoming a standard target for deploying applications, it is more important than ever to be able to seamlessly utilise resources and services from multiple providers. Proprietary vendor APIs make this challenging and lead to conditional code being written to accommodate various API differences, requiring application authors to deal with these complexities and to test their applications against each supported cloud. In this paper, we describe an open source Python library called CloudBridge that provides a simple, uniform, and extensible API for multiple clouds. The library defines a standard 'contract' that all supported providers must implement, and an extensive suite of conformance tests to ensure that any exposed behavior is uniform across cloud providers, thus allowing applications to confidently utilise any of the supported clouds without any cloud-specific code or testing.