Phil Windley, CTO of Kynetx, recently shared his insights regarding data abstractions and the cloud. Windley writes, “One of the primary services of a cloud OS (COS) will be data abstraction. Traditional operating systems provide data abstraction services by presenting programs and users with a file system view of the data stored in the sectors of the disk. We have the same kind of data abstraction opportunities in the cloud, although we aren’t talking about translating sectors into files, of course. And like the access control problem we discussed earlier, the problems that a cloud OS faces are made more complex by the distributed location and control of the data we want to access.”

He continues, “As the [above] chart from Programmable Web shows, the growth of the number of APIs has been exponential over the last 12 years. All these APIs present a tremendous opportunity for application developers and they’ve taken advantage of it. Many of the most interesting applications we’ve seen in mobile and online over the last few years involved mash-ups between multiple APIs. But with that abundance of data comes a problem: programmers have to learn the various details of the APIs, their access methods, and error codes.”

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Image: Courtesy Programmable Web