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Apigee , the free API tools platform from Sonoa Systems (See our previous coverage of Apigee here and here), today partnered with Heroku, the Ruby PaaS provider (See our previous coverage of Heroku here and here ), to offer an easy access to Twitter platform.

Apigee has been providing API tools for developers with focus on high performance, simplicity, security and superior analytics. During the chip conference more than a month back, Apigee announced a tie-up with Twitter to simplify access to Twitter API with enhanced rate limit and better performance. This made it easy for Twitter app developers to access Twitter API without having to read through pages and pages of documentation.

We all know that Heroku is on a mission to simplify application deployment by offering a platform service that makes it super easy for anyone to deploy their application with a few clicks. Their ruby based platform is very attractive for developers who develop apps for social services like Twitter, Facebook, etc..

A marriage between these two companies is quite natural and can greatly empower the developers. In my posts on Heroku, I had mentioned how Heroku’s add-on architecture is removing one of the objections of developers towards PaaS. In another post, I wrote about Northscale and how easy it is for Heroku developers to use memcached with their applications. Today, Apigee announced “Apigee for Twitter Heroku addon” and this will allow Heroku developers to quickly quickly access Twitter API through Apigee with a few clicks, very much like the other add-ons.

Now Ruby developers on Heroku platform can develop Twitter apps with enhanced API rate limits, OAuth authentication, etc.. This is a win win for Twitter app developers. On one hand, they can take advantage of a multiple-tenant highly scalable Heroku platform for their app and, on the other hand, they can take advantage of the simplified access offered by Apigee to Twitter platform with some enhanced features that is otherwise unavailable to them.

Platforms are the future of cloud services and APIs are the oxygen for that future. Heroku and Apigee are getting it right to be major players in the PaaSy future.

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The Clouderati are still busy debating whether open source has any relevance in the cloud based world. This video is one such debate which you might be interested in watching. As I have told in the past, there are two schools of thoughts. One, lead by folks like Tim O’ Reilly, advocate the importance of open architecture, open formats, etc. over licensing and there are others who insist that open source is equally important. Even though open source, by itself, cannot prevent vendor lock-in in some cases, it is equally important in ensuring an open federated cloud ecosystem. In fact, I would even argue that open source is extremely important in accelerating the evolution of the open federated cloud ecosystem which some of us are fantasizing. Having said that I am going to take an example of an open source software and argue that it plays a significant role in creating an interoperable cloud ecosystem.

Last week during the Google I/O event, Google announced Google Storage for Developers, a RESTful storage service for developers to store their data on the highly replicated Google infrastructure. In addition they also announced an open source command-line tool to store, share and manage data, called gsutil.

Using this RESTful API, developers can easily connect their applications to fast, reliable storage replicated across several US data centers. The service offers multiple authentication methods, SSL support and convenient access controls for sharing with individuals and groups. It is highly scalable – supporting read-after-write data consistency, objects of hundreds of gigabytes in size per request, and a domain-scoped namespace. In addition, developers can manage their storage from a web-based interface and use GSUtil, an open-source command-line tool and library.

Apart from the impact of this announcement on the market and speculations about Google’s motives, there is something that is more interesting here and it has been highlighted by Mitch Garnaat in this blog post.

What was even cooler to me personally was that gsutil leverages boto for API-level communication with S3 and GS.  In addition, Google engineers have extended boto with a higher-level abstraction of storage services that implements the URL-style identifiers.  The command line tools are then built on top of this layer.

As an open source developer, it is very satisfying when other developers use your code to do something interesting and this is certainly no exception.

With hardware under the complete control of proprietary vendors and the source code having less direct relevance when open source software is hosted on third party servers without any need to share back to the community, our expectations on the role of open source should also change. We cannot use our worldview from the desktop world and then argue that open source is irrelevant in a cloud based world. When there is a complete shift in how we use computing resources, then we should see open source’s role with a different kind of lens than the one we used during the desktop era. As seen in the above example of Google tapping into Boto project to develop gsutil, open source licensing of Boto was the main reason for Google to develop a software which will let users access files in Amazon S3, Google Storage or even your own storage system using an URL-style identifiers. What are the chances for Google to extend a proprietary tool available for Amazon services to work with their own thus leading to interoperability between Google and Amazon storage services. If you listen to Mitch Garnaat, it is possible to extend Boto to other storage services also. The fact that it is an open source tool makes it highly likely for someone with a need (itch) to extend Boto/gsutils to other services in the future. With a proprietary license, there is no chance for a developer with a need to extend a tool to meet his/her needs. 

In short, open source still is important even in the cloud based world. In spite of all the arguments given against the relevance of open source by pundits, I don’t see it going anywhere. If anything, it only goes on to accelerate the trend towards an interoperable federated cloud ecosystem. Having said that, we need to see the role of open source from a completely different perspective than its role in the desktop dominated world.

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This is the 4th post in the PaaS is the future of Cloud Services Series. In this post, I am going to talk about the importance of extensibility of any platform and highlight one of the vendors in the space, Northscale. Yesterday Northscale announced a Series B funding worth $10M led by Mayfield Fund. Series A investors included Accel Partners and NorthBridge Venture Partners. They also announced the addition of industry veteran Bob Wiederhold as their CEO. I got a chance to talk to Northscale during Under the Radar event and, again, over a telephone call. I am pretty impressed with what they are doing. In this post, I will talk a little bit about the importance of any platform service to be extensible and then dig a bit about Northscale and what they do to extend some of the well known Platform Services vendors.

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