[kierenj]

It's a nice feature-set, looks well-designed, and handy - but anyone using one of these APIs would find it super trivial to implement this themselves? I'm not sure I see the cost-benefit making sense here? I'm keen to be convinced, though - what's the killer use case? (I'm not aware of APIs changing or being deprecated in any big way)

Edit: ah, the other APIs make way more sense to me. You can offer multiple options to a customer. But this doesn't seem to have an equivalent?

[tmm_]

This allows you to easily integrate multiple of these providers if necessary or easily switch. Of course you can integrate them one by one on your own but that takes a lot of time time. With CloudRail it's one API which works even cross platform. Our ultimate goal is to handle all your integrations and not only cloud storage. So unified APIs for fast API integrations and API Change Management to keep your integrations running forever.

[okreallywtf]

Can you provide a use-case for when you would need to be able to easily switch (or potentially hot-swap) cloud storage? It sounds like some of the justification for ORM's; while it would be nice to have if it took no more time to integrate with that API its hard for me to see how it could justify extra effort in implementation/maintenance unless you have a concrete understanding of when you need it.

[blantonl]

Pricing.

[kierenj]

I see what the feature is, but I don't see the use case or benefit - in this particular case! The social, payment, consumer storage, I definitely do. But it feels a little like the age-old example of abstracting away your database layer, in case you wanted to change which database you use later. (It's incredibly rare to do it!)

[tmm_]

Even if you don't want to switch and believe in non changing APIs, it is easier to integrate with CloudRail :) But as already mentioned, this interface is really part of a bigger offering. We want to handle all your integrations eventually and enterprise cloud storage has to be part of that.

[ohstopitu]

so how exactly would changes in API be handled?

[tmm_]

Our system monitors the APIs and informs us about changes or the provider does. This happens usually months before the integration would actually break. Afterwards CloudRail updates the SDKs and informs the affected users via email and in the portal. And affected means really affected, so only if you use this specific (broken) function. All you need to do then is update the SDK to it's latest version. We are also working on a optional and completely automated way to update the SDK. But most developers want to test it before. Btw, any opinions on the auto update here?

[tedmiston]

It's (kind of) like Segment for backend storage services.