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I used Jclouds [1] a few years back to do this. While it's very powerful, it's also fairly complex (abstracts not just storage but also compute/etc). At the time, I remember wanting a simpler abstraction layer over it, and ended up building my own. Maybe something like that exists now, I'm not sure.

The devil is in the details of how each provider offers vendor-specific things and you want to take advantage of them. For example Reduced-Redundancy storage is iirc an Amazon-specific offering, or if others offer it, it's probably under different SLA terms/measurements. This rapidly breaks many generic abstractions; maybe this is why everyone ends up writing their own little shim layer for their situation.

In some sense it reminds me a bit of building database-connection-pools in the 90's, before they were really standardized everyone rolled their own and learned all the awful lessons about reference counting along the way. Then along came ODBC, then JDBC, and things were so much easier because you only had to deal with one API, and the databases would conform to their side of it. So I think, isn't that what OpenStack (or something?) is supposed to be for cloud services? But whoa, the depth and complexity of these services far exceeds that of a 90's database. It will take a while -- but over time and with patterns of common use well established, a stable base of standard APIs will abstract away most differences, making things so much nicer. I can dream.

[1] https://jclouds.apache.org/




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