What is open cloud?
Open cloud, we’ve all heard about it, but what is it?
So today, I will be diving in a little deeper for you guys, open cloud will be able to integrate into your toolchains and workflows, making your work more efficient and allowing you to use a larger amount of tools.
OpenCloud is designed to allow you to use every single API you use within Roblox studio can be accessible to you via standard Web API’s. Roblox wants to make it available for people to optimise and automate workflows.
What is the point of Open Cloud?
If you manage to automate all the tedious work within Roblox studio you will be able to spend more time to focus being creative and building interesting content for the platform. This will consequently attract more players, more engagement which will help enlarge the development community and which in turn will lead to more useful, powerful tools, this means by integrating Open Cloud into your projects your benefit not only yourself but the entire development community.
You may still be thinking, what’s the point of open cloud?
Open cloud will mean:
- You don’t always need to push out a heavy lifting update which can be disruptive to gameplay.
- You can pre-code certain Events, for example, Halloween Events and hide them behind settings, when it’s time for the event simply click a button, the webpage will the in turn call a datastore API and then turn on the settings which all live servers will receive and process, meaning all Events will go live without gameplay being compromised. A simple example of how you can optimise your workflow.
- Or interacting with other parts of the Roblox website, such as the marketplace & other things.
- Interacting with 3rd party applications, such as analytics, where you can log in on your Roblox account & contribute your statistics.
Here are a few examples, which will help unleash your creativity.
What does Roblox want to achieve with this?
One of the presenters @roblox who talked about the open-source wants to envision a “Thriving application ecosystem, where you can not only build your tools but write your script you can also find thousands of applications from the community!”.
This is an incredibly large goal Roblox has set & achieving it will be difficult, how will Roblox achieve this?
This is what ROBLOX has in plan to tackle this issue:
- [ ] Start laying down the foundations
- [ ] Make secure standards for using the resources, using API keys (already available in the “Developer Dashboard”). This will allow you to make your scripts and tools.
- [ ] However, to use a 3rd party tools you must simply authorise the third-party application to access your results, that’s why Roblox wants to enable it via AWS too (industry standard).
Once the foundation is down:
Start thinking about gradually integrating more API’s.
The security and also authentication/authorization is not what you can get the value out of the open cloud API.
Roblox has started to work with publishing, where you can automate the game-release workflow; such as publishing your game automatically. “We are planning on adding more endpoints” states another Roblox presenter.
For the future:
This is what Roblox may be thinking of adding in the future.
- [ ] Data Styles
- [ ] Marketplace Analytics
And many not named. Roblox would like to grow upon this idea and would benefit from your ideas and opinions. Once we develop these apps, Roblox wants to further enrich the “eco-system”. Roblox believes if you can develop high-end awesome applications you should get rewarded for it.
Roblox wants you to have the option to charge your user-base & get the revenue out of these high-end apps. If you are the client Roblox wants you to have a place where you can easily discover and search for the most relevant apps for your need.
Open Cloud - What could it do in the future?
Roblox wants it so you can talk to the open cloud API & interact with your creations with your programs and workflows.
It could also be able to interact with data stores, as we all know DataStore v2.0 was released, allowing you to go to past versions, adding cool and amazing improvements!
It’s already well and good using these tools inside of Roblox Studio, but imagine the possibilities to access datastores outside of the studio!
Roblox’s goal is to add a feature where you can access anything through Lua with the API, In addition to this there are many other important things that people want to interact with, such as player purchases, inventories and all these other things, however, this is sensitive info. Roblox wants to make sure creators feel comfortable & have peace of mind when you set API permissions, you will be able to edit these permissions very precisely, you can configure the API key for just a specific experience, or in fact, you can set it to a specific datastore (for example), you also give even more precise info, such as allowing just the read permission.
This will open so many opportunities and creativities, this opens so many gates and will give people a lot of freedom to add what they want to.
How can I use Open-Cloud?
Open-cloud isn’t too developed quite yet, once again it is a WIP and will take a while to integrate.
The only API only allows us to publish our games remotely, however, I will be showing you how to do this in a video that I will be releasing later tonight.
I hope you look forward to the tutorial.
Conclusion?
In general, I think this is a highly intriguing project and will catch the eyes of many skilled developers around the globe, it will open many gates allowing people to start using 3rd party services & making your work more efficient and faster!
I would love to hear your opinion on what you would like to do with this. 
Feel free to give your view down below! 
