Doug Tidwell has posted the first part of a series of tutorials looking at connecting your Zend Framework applications with "the cloud" to the IBM developerWorks site. This initial article focuses on integrating an application with the Amazon S3 technology.

Cloud computing promises unlimited disk space for users and applications. In an ideal world, accessing that storage would be as easy as accessing a local hard drive. Unfortunately, the basic APIs of most cloud storage services force programmers to think about protocols and configuration details instead of simply working with their data. This article looks at classes in the Zend Framework that make it easy to use Amazon's S3 cloud storage service as a boundless hard drive.

Their sample application will show you how to grab the list of your buckets and objects as well as work with current items and create new ones. The interface is made much simpler by the Zend_Service_Amazon_S3 component.