Couple of questions…

 

By introducing Atom, are you proposing it to be the meta-model of OCCI? If it is the meta-model then we should define relationships at a model level as atom will not do this for us. These relationships are not detailed in the Noun/Verb/Attribute page.

 

How does it differ by choosing the approach of SUN/Vmware/Elastichosts/GoGrid?

 

All of which use a specific model that is rendered in various ways. Randy, Richard, Tim, Chris, any practical  implications on using atom?

 

Andy

 

 

Morning all,

I'm going to break my own rules about reposting blog posts because this is very highly relevant, it's 03:30am already and I'm traveling again tomorrow. The next step for us is to work out what the protocol itself will look like on the wire, which is something I have been spending a good deal of time looking at over many months (both analysing existing efforts and thinking of "blue sky" possibilities).

I am now 100% convinced that the best results are to be had with a variant of XML over HTTP (as is the case with Amazon, Google, Sun and VMware) and that while Google's GData is by far the most successful cloud API in terms of implementations, users, disparate services, etc. Amazon's APIs are (at least for the foreseeable future) a legal minefield. I'm also very interested in the direction Sun and VMware are going and have of course been paying very close attention to existing public clouds like ElasticHosts and GoGrid (with a view to being essentially backwards compatible and sysadmin friendly).

I think the best strategy by a country mile is to standardise OCCI core protocol following Google's example (e.g. base it on Atom and/or AtomPub with additional specs for search, caching, etc.), build IaaS extensions in the spirit of Sun/VMware APIs and support alternative formats including HTML, JSON and TXT via XML Stylesheets (e.g. occi-to-html.xsl, occi-to-json.xsl and occi-to-text.xsl). You can see the basics in action thanks to my Google App Engine reference implementation at http://occitest.appspot.com/ (as well as HTML, JSON and TXT versions of same), KISS junkies bearing in mind that this weighs in under 200 lines of python code! Of particular interest is the ease at which arbitrarily complex [X]HTML interfaces can be built directly on top of OCCI (optionally rendered from raw XML in the browser itself) and the use of the hCard microformat as a simple demonstration of what is possible.

Anyway, without further ado:

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), 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, 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, such as text/html), which doesn't bode well for realising the vision of the [Semantic] 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 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, and while people don't bother to look under the hood (no doubt thanks to the myriad client libraries 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 and caching).

OCCI

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.

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) prevent the use of Amazon's "open source" clients with anything other than Amazon's own services.
• Patents pending like #20070156842 cover the Amazon Web Services APIs and we know that Amazon have been known to use patents offensively against competitors.
• Trademarks like #3346899 prevent us from even referring to the Amazon APIs by name.

While I wish the guys at Eucalyptus and Canonical 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 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 and RFC 5023: Atom Publishing Protocol) 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.

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