Dear Salvatore,
2. Site-BDII provider update to publish cloud info in both 2.0 and 2.1 (this can be done in parallel with #1, since Top-BDIIs not already updated to 2.1 will just ignore the new 2.1 entities) Which provider do you mean here? There is no need to change the ldap info provider. It will automatically publish GLUE 2.1 as long as the right version of the glue-schema package containing GLUE 2.1 is installed in the BDII. This means, a top BDII with the right version of the glue-schema will publish cloud objects of those site BDIIs with the right version of the glue-schema publishing cloud objects. the cloud-info-provider, no need to change the others. Note that, for now, the cloud-info-provider is producing GLUE 2.0 entities (so a undocumented community profile for EGI to represent cloud sources).
But the cloud info provider is not running in the site BDII, this is running in the resource BDII of the cloud resources, right? What you have to decide is when to start publishing information in 2.1. There is no way to know whether BDIIs have upgraded or not. The only thing we currently publish in the BDII is the version of the bdii package, and this package is not affected here. So at some point you may start publishing GLUE 2.1 and depending on which BDII you query you may see this information or not. For a period of time the information published is going to be "chaotic": cloud resources published in both 2.0 and 2.1, BDIIs publishing cloud resources, BDIIs missing cloud resources...
AppDB is also queryiing the BDII to get the cloud information automatically, and there is plan to add COMPs and other cloud brokers too. I will push these latest to the 2.1 draft, also because they need information who is not published in our 2.0 profile right now.
This is something you can do at any time. Ideally you could query 2.1 and fallback to 2.0 for a while. How much are you using right now the cloud information published in 2.0? If you don't have a specific use case, it may be worth considering switching off 2.0 as soon as you start publishing 2.1, only if you could live with the fact that not all BDIIs will publish this info until they upgrade. Like this there is no mix of cloud resources in 2.0 and 2.1, although maybe this is not such a problem after all... Regards, Maria