On Wed, May 13, 2009 at 10:05 PM, Tim Bray <span dir="ltr">&lt;<a href="mailto:Tim.Bray@sun.com">Tim.Bray@sun.com</a>&gt;</span> wrote:<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">

What Sam&#39;s saying seems sensible to me.   At Sun, our core minimum set of nouns is VM, VM Template, Private network, public IP address, and &quot;cluster&quot;, a simple grouping mechanism.  I can&#39;t imagine constructing anything useful with much less than that.  -Tim<br>

</blockquote></div><br>Thanks Tim - let&#39;s see if you still think so when I explain further:<br><ul><li>Your &quot;VM&quot; is our &quot;server&quot; resource - we don&#39;t care if you run VPSs, VMs or physical machines.</li>
<li>VM Templates are a WiP but basically a &quot;server&quot; that lacks a &quot;start&quot; button so far... rather something like a &quot;clone&quot; operation. They may have their own category. There&#39;s different types of templates - resources (e.g. Amazon&#39;s &quot;small&quot; and &quot;large&quot; instances), appliances (e.g. published AMIs), combinations of the two, and quite probably others I haven&#39;t thought of. I think this approach is flexible enough.<br>
</li><li>Your &quot;Private network&quot; is our &quot;network&quot;... which is itself basically a physical piece of wire/hub. I don&#39;t think IPs pull enough weight around here to become first class citizens (I just don&#39;t see the point) so they currently hang off networks.</li>
<li>Your &quot;cluster&quot; is our &quot;category&quot; - I very much prefer being as flexible as possible when it comes to taxonomies because this tends to be highly application-specific and varies from user to user. Atom is particularly good here as it allows us to have multiple vocabularies - such as &quot;Operating System&quot; or &quot;Location&quot; and as a significant bonus folksonomies (user-tagging) are thrown in for free. Questions like &quot;give me all my windows boxes in california&quot; become URLs like <a href="http://example.com/-/Windows/California">http://example.com/-/Windows/California</a> under the current proposal.<br>
</li></ul>The last point is something that I&#39;ve been meaning to bring up separately (and likely will soon) as the model Andy recently added uses more traditional and less flexible groups with a global namespace. For tiny installations that might be ok but anything bigger than that will obviously benefit from flexible organisation - it is after all just like an infinitely large library.<br>
<br>In any case I hope you will agree that we can keep things simple and get by with three resources.<br><br>Sam<br><br>