[occi-wg] Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?

Reposting with comments, esp: "*I'm not a XML or JSON expert, but I think this is not the time for the OCCI guys to discuss it, there work is already on top of XML and they should focus it, specially, on its simplicity.*" Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?<http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html>The Web is built on the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP>, a client-server protocol that simply allows client user agents to retrieve and manipulate resources stored on a server. It follows that a single protocol could prove similarly critical for Cloud Computing<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_computing>, but what would that protocol look like? The first place to look for the answer is limitations in HTTP itself. For a start the protocol doesn't care about the payload it carries (beyond its Internet media type <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_media_type>, such as text/html), which doesn't bode well for realising the vision<http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/Activity.html>of the [ Semantic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web>] Web<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Wide_Web>as a "universal medium for the exchange of data". Surely it should be possible to add some structure to that data in the simplest way possible, without having to resort to carrying complex, opaque file formats (as is the case today)? Ideally any such scaffolding added would be as light as possible, providing key attributes common to all objects (such as updated time) as well as basic metadata such as contributors, categories, tags and links to alternative versions. The entire web is built on hyperlinks so it follows that the ability to link between resources would be key, and these links should be flexible such that we can describe relationships in some amount of detail. The protocol would also be capable of carrying opaque payloads (as HTTP does today) and for bonus points transparent ones that the server can seamlessly understand too. Like HTTP this protocol would not impose restrictions on the type of data it could carry but it would be seamlessly (and safely) extensible so as to support everything from contacts to contracts, biographies to books (or entire libraries!). Messages should be able to be serialised for storage and/or queuing as well as signed and/or encrypted to ensure security. Furthermore, despite significant performance improvements introduced in HTTP 1.1 it would need to be able to stream many (possibly millions) of objects as efficiently as possible in a single request too. Already we're asking a lot from something that must be extremely simple and easy to understand. XML It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that this "new" protocol is going to be XML based, building on top of HTTP in order to take advantage of the extensive existing infrastructure. Those of us who know even a little about XML will be ready to point out that the "X" in XML means "eXtensible" so we need to be specific as to the schema for this assertion to mean anything. This is where things get interesting. We could of course go down the WS-* route and try to write our own but surely someone else has crossed this bridge before - after all, organising and manipulating objects is one of the primary tasks for computers. Who better to turn to for inspiration than a company whose mission<http://www.google.com/corporate/>it is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful", Google. They use a single protocol for almost all of their APIs, GData <http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/>, and while people don't bother to look under the hood (no doubt thanks to the myriad client libraries <http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/clientlibs.html> made available under the permissive Apache 2.0 license), when you do you may be surprised at what you find: everything from contacts to calendar items, and pictures to videos is a feed (with some extensions for things like searching<http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/basics.html#Searching>and caching<http://code.google.com/apis/gdata/docs/2.0/reference.html#ResourceVersioning> ). OCCI Enter the OGF's Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI)<http://www.occi-wg.org/>whose (initial) goal it is to provide an extensible interface to Cloud Infrastructure Services (IaaS). To do so it needs to allow clients to enumerate and manipulate an arbitrary number of server side "resources" (from one to many millions) all via a single entry point. These compute, network and storage resources need to be able to be created, retrieved, updated and deleted (CRUD) and links need to be able to be formed between them (e.g. virtual machines linking to storage devices and network interfaces). It is also necessary to manage state (start, stop, restart) and retrieve performance and billing information, among other things. The OCCI working group basically has two options now in order to deliver an implementable draft this month as promised: follow Amazon or follow Google (the whole while keeping an eye on other players including Sun and VMware). Amazon use a simple but sprawling XML based API with a PHP style flat namespace and while there is growing momentum around it, it's not without its problems. Not only do I have my doubts about its scalability outside of a public cloud environment (calls like 'DescribeImages' would certainly choke with anything more than a modest number of objects and we're talking about potentially millions) but there are a raft of intellectual property issues as well: - *Copyrights* (specifically section 3.3 of the Amazon Software License<http://aws.amazon.com/asl/>) prevent the use of Amazon's "open source" clients with anything other than Amazon's own services. - *Patents* pending like #20070156842<http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PG01&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.html&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=%2220070156842%22.PGNR.&OS=DN/20070156842&RS=DN/20070156842>cover the Amazon Web Services APIs and we know that Amazon have been known to use patents offensively<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click#Barnes_.26_Noble>against competitors. - *Trademarks* like #3346899<http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarr?regser=serial&entry=77054011>prevent us from even referring to the Amazon APIs by name. While I wish the guys at Eucalyptus <http://open.eucalyptus.com/> and Canonical <http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-292296.html> well and don't have a bad word to say about Amazon Web Services, this is something I would be bearing in mind while actively seeking alternatives, especially as Amazon haven't worked out<http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/01/20/Cloud-Interop>whether the interfaces are IP they should protect. Even if these issues were resolved via royalty free licensing it would be very hard as a single vendor to compete with truly open standards (RFC 4287: Atom Syndication Format<http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4287>and RFC 5023: Atom Publishing Protocol <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5023>) which were developed at IETF by the community based on loose consensus and running code. So what does all this have to do with an API for Cloud Infrastructure Services (IaaS)? In order to facilitate future extension my initial designs for OCCI have been as modular as possible. In fact the core protocol is completely generic, describing how to connect to a single entry point, authenticate, search, create, retrieve, update and delete resources, etc. all using existing standards including HTTP, TLS, OAuth and Atom. On top of this are extensions for compute, network and storage resources as well as state control (start, stop, restart), billing, performance, etc. in much the same way as Google have extensions for different data types (e.g. contacts vs YouTube movies). Simply by standardising at this level OCCI may well become the HTTP of Cloud Computing. 10 comments: bb <http://b.b3k.us/> said... Sam, I'm hoping there is more to the various decisions than is outlined in this post. "Everyone is doing it" is illustrative, but not convincing. XML drags along an awful lot of baggage, which has resulted in many folks using lighter-weight formats like JSON. ATOM, in turns, lards still more baggage into the mix, again, without any clear advantage in this application. Finally, OAuth is very much in flux, as the recent security incident makes painfully clear, and, once again, its compelling advantage in this scenario is not covered above. The Sun Cloud API work is extremely solid and goes towards simplicity in almost every choice. Why are you ignoring it? Ben Tuesday, 5 May 2009 4:28:00 AM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1241490480000#c6419411439335971468> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=6419411439335971468> Sam Johnston <http://www.blogger.com/profile/13816529874906993705> said... G'day Ben, Au contraire, we are paying *very* close attention to the Sun Cloud APIs and originally wanted to draw from them heavily were it not for a disagreement with the OGF powers that be over Creative Commons licensing. Nonetheless we have learnt a lot from them about high level concepts such as having a single entry point and "buttons" for state changes and the like. We are also looking at simple text based APIs like those used at ElasticHosts and GoGrid (and of course Amazon). Sun's decision to use JSON no doubt stems from the fact that the API was previously consumed almost exclusively by the Q-Layer web interface - it is not so clear that it is the best choice when you stray from the web and native JavaScript environments, particularly when you want to (safely) support extensibility... XML allows users to extend the API as necessary in a fashion that can be validated and will not break other extensions. Another reasonably firm requirement is that it be possible/trivial to script the interface for e.g. sysadmin tasks... for this we need a simple text based protocol anyway so we already have to support more than one output format (which is increasingly common today, even if not particularly elegant). Finally, given that technology is only half the battle (the other half being marketing/politics), it's necessary to cater to the needs of enterprise users who are well used to horrors like WS-* and who will find a lightweight XML layer refreshingly simple in comparison to the status quo. More importantly though, enterprise requirements like validation, signing, encryption, etc. are natively supported by XML and not (easily) supported for the alternatives. Oh and we are not at all wedded to OAuth - any HTTP authentication mechanism will do (though it may make sense for us to limit this somewhat for interoperability). For more specific details check out the wiki<http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/HomePage>and/or get involved yourself. Sam Tuesday, 5 May 2009 9:33:00 AM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1241508780000#c4300728670229206261> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=4300728670229206261> bb <http://b.b3k.us/> said... Sam, The onus is on you to justify the additional complexity. Rejecting simpler solutions because they are unfamiliar is dangerous. While JSON might have initially entered the protocol via Q-Layer, the current state of the work is miles from those origins. JSON has similarly moved well beyond its origins as something used by Javascript (see CouchDB for a great example). Finally, it is a simple, text-based system, far simpler than XML, and I have recent, painful experience in working in JSON and XML simultaneously for systems management. It's a no brainer: JSON wins in that space because it is easier to write, easier to read, and a lot harder to make poor, structural decisions using it. Enterprises currently use a lot of XML because that is what vendors like Microsoft foisted on them in the name of "standards". If you adopt all the existing validation and security stack for XML, you are so close to WS-* as to be indistinguishable. This work will fail if all it does is produce "WS-Cloud", and that is very much the path on which you are placing it with these choices. You can do better. Ben Tuesday, 5 May 2009 11:30:00 AM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1241515800000#c7113412609436775580> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=7113412609436775580> Sam Johnston <http://www.blogger.com/profile/13816529874906993705> said... Ben, Thanks for your ongoing interest in this topic - your opinion is valued (and not just by me) so I would very much like us to be on the same wavelength. I've since been looking at CouchDB which is a very interesting project given one of the design patterns I've been keeping in mind is a database driven controller (that is, OCCI being a direct interface to the database) with triggers firing off e.g. AMQP messages for state changes et al. Erlang is the obvious choice for such infrastructure and it seems like CouchDB has done a lot of the work already. Of course it's well out of scope for the spec itself but it's useful to consider how it might be realised. In terms of the XML vs JSON bikeshed <http://www.bikeshed.com/> (and I say bikeshed because once you have to reach for library, as is the case for both XML and JSON, you may as well use ASN.1 on the wire for all it matters), I have many reasons for preferring XML, not the least of which is the ease at which it can be trivially converted to $PREFERRED_FORMAT using tools and expertise that already exists (the same cannot necessarily be said for the reverse, or between other formats). Very few enterprise developers have JSON exposure, let alone experience, and it's not surprising given that essential features such as schemas <http://www.json.com/json-schema-proposal/> and validation are still in a state of flux. Incidentally one thing I *do* like about YAML (and to a lesser extent, JSON) is the relative ease at which even complex data structures can be represented - this does provide more rope with which to hang oneself though. This brings us to the specifics of the proposal... XML can be [ab]used in so many different ways it's worth pointing out that the proposal uses it in the simplest way possible. Atom giving us just enough structure to link objects together, categorise them and provide metadata (such as owners, etags for caching, etc.) - as Andy observed it's more of a meta-model than anything else and we found that much of what we were trying to do was reinventing the [Atom] wheel. The actual content itself (cpu, memory, etc.) is simple, easily readable, and in all cases so far, flat... as such it's more a question of whether we use angle brackets or curly braces :) So why go for angle brackets (XML) over curly braces (JSON) given most of the action is going on in the latter camp? In addition to the reasons given above, Google. That is, if we essentially rubber stamp GData (a well proven protocol) in the form of OCCI core then it's just a matter of changing (or supporting multiple) namespaces and we may well be able to get Google on board along with a raft of running code. I've already been discussing this with Google's API gurus and product managers this week and while there's no commitment there is some amount of interest. As for WS-Cloud, I assure you this is nothing like it... I wonder when reading the WS-[death]* specs whether they weren't deliberately obfuscated in some cases and even the better ones like WS-Agreement<http://samj.net/2009/05/www.ogf.org/documents/GFD.107.pdf>are [over]complicated, in this case running out to dozens of pages. Sam Wednesday, 6 May 2009 11:49:00 AM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1241603340000#c7503506562813624552> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=7503506562813624552> William Vambenepe <http://stage.vambenepe.com/> said... Speaking of WS-*, I don't think it's a selfish plug for me to point you towards the post in which I examine how previous efforts (mainly around WS-*) can inform Cloud standards going forward. It is very relevant to what you write here. When I read this paragraph: "Enter the OGF's Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) whose (initial) goal it is to provide an extensible interface to Cloud Infrastructure Services (IaaS). To do so it needs to allow clients to enumerate and manipulate an arbitrary number of server side "resources" (from one to many millions) all via a single entry point. These compute, network and storage resources need to be able to be created, retrieved, updated and deleted (CRUD) and links need to be able to be formed between them (e.g. virtual machines linking to storage devices and network interfaces). It is also necessary to manage state (start, stop, restart) and retrieve performance and billing information, among other things." ... I am a bit worried because you describe the whole field of IT modeling and interoperability as we've tried to capture it for the last decade. So when I see that you plan to "deliver an implementable draft this month" I get a little worried. Anyway, here is the "lessons to learn" post, titled "A post-mortem on the previous IT management revolution": http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/700Among other things, beware on focusing on protocols rather than models, beware of working without clear use cases and beware of trying to address broad problems rather than constrained problems. BTW, I am not saying that you are doing these things and I haven't looked at the working documents on the OCCI site. These are just thoughts that come to mind from reading this blog entry. Wednesday, 6 May 2009 11:59:00 AM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1241603940000#c8765972353953633859> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=8765972353953633859> James Broberg <http://www.metacdn.org/> said... Interesting post Sam. As someone spectating the process it seems that there is so much duplicate work going on in cloud standards. Just to name a few of the many ongoing “open” standards efforts: 1. Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum; 2. Open Grid Forum (OGF) Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group; 3. DMTF Open Cloud Standards Incubator 4. GoGrid API (CC licensed) 5. Sun Cloud API (CC licensed) 6. Amazon Web Services as “de-facto” (i.e. as Euc. and Nimbus have proceeded). Someone more cynical than I could take the next step, creating another standard / working group that sits on top of them all :) Monday, 11 May 2009 4:21:00 PM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1242051660000#c3790762555822944522> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=3790762555822944522> pcalcada <http://www.cloudviews.org/author/pcalcada/> said... What James has just said is definitely result of the growing interest on Cloud Computing, and is something we all have seen happening on other emerging technologies. It could be a problem only if those who are working on the projects became out of focus, and specially if they became in any kind of collision route :). And that, I think, is something is not happening with the work promoted here. I'm not a XML or JASON expert, but I think this is not the time for the OCCI guys to discuss it, there work is already on top of XML and they should focus it, specially, on its simplicity. Regarding the OAuth security problems, I leave here a reference to an interesting document done by Nat Sakimura about it, and about OpenID CX could be a "perfect" solution: http://www.sakimura.org/en/modules/wordpress/index.php?p=77 Sunday, 17 May 2009 1:17:00 PM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1242559020000#c2803257747027186479> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=2803257747027186479> Sam Johnston <http://www.blogger.com/profile/13816529874906993705> said... @William: Thanks for the feedback and for taking the time to write your excellent post-mortem <http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/700>. I'm quite convinced that one of the primary causes for WS-[death]*'s failure was the formation of various groups trying to deal with problems in a vacuum. If you put the blinkers on you're going to end up with a myriad disparate and/or overlapping standards, all of which need to be understood and implemented for the resulting system to succeed. The concern I have now is that by seeking to stick to the [hastily created] charter word for word and ignoring the context of other working groups we could be setting the wheels in motion for an equally catastrophic CC-[death]*, only with different people and the formats du jour. Granted, the [over-]complexity of SOAP et al raised the barriers to entry (some [vendors] would say that's a GoodThing™) but over-simplification can just as easily result in the same outcome. I'd very much like to see us build on work already done (e.g. AtomPub) but if there's a simpler way that doesn't involve rolling a new protocol for each itch that needs scratching then I'm all ears. Watch this space... Sam Sunday, 24 May 2009 12:07:00 PM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1243159648073#c8385478345760581504> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=8385478345760581504> Sam Johnston <http://www.blogger.com/profile/13816529874906993705> said... @James: There has been some talk about creating a meta-standard group of some sort - what could possibly go wrong? *cough*WS-I*cough* My preference is to forge links between working groups as I have done already with SNIA (the last OCCI call was joint with an SNIA face-to-face meeting). And by links I don't mean worthless MoU style documents, rather real intergeek working relationships. I'd happily do this myself were it not for the cumulative expense/effort of joining the various SSOs, but I will anyway for the stuff I care about (e.g. OCCI) Sam Sunday, 24 May 2009 12:12:00 PM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1243159937685#c5428022229359583026> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=5428022229359583026> Sam Johnston <http://www.blogger.com/profile/13816529874906993705> said... @Paulo: The XML-xenophobes/JSON-junkies made it perfectly clear in London last week that their position is immutable. I'm busying myself this weekend working out a solution so this unnecessary religious war doesn't jeopardise the whole project. XML is certainly well established and an obvious choice [to me], but the stuff I'm looking at now may be able to dispense with it altogether... watch this space. Looking forward to exploring the identity issues in Portugal this week. Sam Sunday, 24 May 2009 12:40:00 PM CEST <http://samj.net/2009/05/is-occi-http-of-cloud-computing.html?showComment=1243161624114#c3640945663217746787><http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=3640945663217746787> <http://www.blogger.com/delete-comment.g?blogID=6834535&postID=3640945663217746787>