The great thing about API’s is that developers can create brand new apps that tap into an ecosystem of web services. This is especially true of data based services (after all if data is the new oil etc etc !). Why store your own proprietary App data when there are so many great data stores out there ? In fact why not make data key to your app proposition ?
The Storage Made Easy File Fabric provides a multi-cloud storage API. It works with over 60 on-premises or on-cloud storage endpoints. All of the File Fabric Apps and clients are built using it, including the recently announced Slack integration.
What is the File Fabric I hear you ask? Well, the File Fabric provides a ‘single pane of glass’ that presents data from multiple sources, be that on-premises, a data centre, or the Cloud. Once data is hooked up that is where the multicloud API becomes useful.
I thought it would be cool to showcase exactly what a mutlicloud solution could be used for. Many people no doubt use Spotify to stream their music. If you have your own collection of personal music then you may have used Microsoft Groove to do something similar (although that is likely to change now that Groove Apps are being retired). You may have music stored on various cloud services, as most people do these days. How about an App that could talk to the different cloud services and use the music that is stored there to create a playlist and stream the music on-demand.
It turns out that this type of App is not that hard to build when using the multi-cloud API to connect with the different cloud services, particularly as the File Fabric already supports streaming.
Below is a video that shows a Mac App that was built to demonstrate such a concept. If you have a File Fabric hosted or on-premises account you can download and run the streaming App. Alternatively if you have not there is a 14 day trial (no credit card required) so you can still check it out.
The key pieces of the video are:
- Music is stored on two clouds – in this case DropBox and Google Drive, but it could have been any of the 60+ on-premises and on-cloud storage clouds that the File Fabric supports
- The File Fabric has been hooked up to those two Clouds and metadata has been indexed (no files are moved or transferred. They remain on the original storage).
- The Audio app used the SME multi-cloud Api to interrogate the metadata and find MP3’s stored on the File Fabric virtual system, which are located on Google Storage and DropBox. It used this information to interact with the files as needed on the backend storage clouds.
The Audio streaming App can be downloaded here and it requires a File Fabric hosted or on-premises account.
OK, so we have proved we can do this with Audio, what about video ? It turns out that also is not that difficult to do.
First we add some royalty free videos to our Google Drive and DropBox, which become instantly accessible through the File Fabric File Manager.
Using the bare bones of the same framework we can make some small tweaks and return MP4 files instead of MP3 files and now we have single namespace media App that can stream videos on demand.
You can download the video streaming App here, and again it requires a Storage Made Easy hosted or on-premises account.
At some point I will push the code out for both of these Apps to GitHub as they serve as good examples for companies wanting to use and extend them.