Salesforce's expansion across AWS, Alibaba Cloud, and GCP created significant development challenges that required a new approach.
Writing code for multiple cloud providers leads to duplication, complex maintenance with branches or if-else conditions, and a lack of standardized abstractions.
The SDK was created at Salesforce to solve real-world challenges encountered during the Alibaba Cloud onboarding after finding existing solutions like Apache JClouds were sunset.
Key developer challenges include bloated service code, inconsistent API semantics between providers, a steep learning curve, and duplicated integration efforts across teams.
The SDK allows developers to write business logic once against a common abstraction, which then uses the appropriate native provider SDK behind the scenes at runtime.
The next step is to build open-source AI tooling, including an MCP server and plugins, to automate the migration of provider-specific code to the multi-cloud abstraction.
To build community trust, the project will publish performance benchmarks comparing the Multi-Cloud SDK against native provider SDKs to ensure there is no significant overhead.
Developers can find the project on GitHub, read the official documentation, and follow articles on DZone for more in-depth examples and use cases.
Jobs that call for the skills explored in this talk.