OpenStack has become the go to way to build open source public or private clouds. PHP is one of the most popular programming languages on the planet and the dominating server side language of the web.

What if you want to marry PHP and OpenStack? To have PHP work with OpenStack APIs using services or managing them? Until recently the efforts have focused on SDKs and language bindings for companies like Rackspace and HP. The libraries from these companies may support some of OpenStack but have been focused on the stacks provided by these companies rather than all of the options.

With the OpenStack SDK for PHP this changes. This SDK is meant to be by the community and for the community. It will be able to work with clouds from a variety of vendors or vanilla OpenStack setups.

What Will It Provide?

This SDK is targeted at meeting the needs of application developers. This is different from those who are building OpenStack or standing it up. We want to make it easy to use OpenStack for the long tail of applications written in PHP. To that end it will:

• Provide a language binding. You can work with OpenStack APIs using regular PHP.
• Contain documentation explaining how the code works and how to get going with OpenStack. We don’t expect application developers to understand OpenStack when they first approach it.
• Share code examples for working with OpenStack. This includes writing code that will easily work with different vendors.
• Be framework agnostic. We’re supporting the efforts of the PHP Framework Interoperability Group (FIG). If you’re using Symfony, the Zend Framework, or something else meant to be interoperable we want to make it easy to work with OpenStack.

Where Are We At?

The SDK is currently under development but moving fairly quickly. The near term goal is to come to a stable API with support for Identity Service (the basis authentication and authorization) and Object Storage. Once the SDK API is in place we’ll move to support more services and add more documentation.

We are also at a good point for others to get involved in the effort. If you want to learn more about what’s going on or contribute, now is a good time to come around.

How To Get Involved?

If you’re interested in getting involved there are a few ways you can get going.

1. Find us in IRC and strike up a conversation. I’m mfer on Freenode and you can find me in the room #openstack-sdks.
2. Check out the OpenStack wiki page about the PHP SDK.
3. Join us for a meeting in IRC. The next one is this Wednesday at 11:30am ET (15:30 UTC).
4. Poke around the code on Github. Note, Github is a mirror of the code. If you’re interested in getting involved in the development process please jump into IRC or the documentation to learn more about it.

If you have any questions or suggestions please let us know. We hope to help applications successfully use OpenStack.