[viraptor]

Actually unless you're doing something very tightly connected to one single service, there's a number of libraries you can use which will give you a nice abstraction.

There was also some reverse-proxy which "normalises" your requests for a given provider presented on Fossdem this year, but I can't recall the name.

[justinsb]

Abstraction layers are nice in principle, but the issue isn't really the APIs, it is the different semantics. To give a concrete example, on Rackspace's (current) IaaS offering disks are local to the machine and persistent; on Amazon's offering disks are local and ephemeral, or locked to one AZ and persistent.

The API issue is a triviality compared to hiding those details. I think that's the real power of OpenStack - the shared API is a convenience, but the shared model is priceless.