Afternoon all,

Over the last few weeks I've been busy evangelising OCCI at various cloud computing events througout Europe:
In addition to doing the Introduction to the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) presentation I had the opportunity to sit on panels at the events and to introduce "Interoperability" as the topic for Cloud Views 2010. It was great to meet many of you and to have various opportunities to discuss (often at length) the API - some great feedback was given and good progress made on working towards consensus. We've found ways to evict Atom from individual resources and adopt a simple key/value descriptor format for a start which should make some of you very happy.

I also spent 90 minutes running through and discussing OCCI with the SNIA Cloud TWG at their last meeting (last week) which I think is a great opportunity for us to ensure that our respective standards are at least somewhat compatible and avoid a rerun of WS-* (I would hope for example that we can use an SNIA descriptor format to define non-trivial storage resources). Thijs is busy formalising this arrangement and a similar one with the DMTF and I encourage those of you who are interested in these projects to join them so we can get some cross-pollination going on (especially those of you employed by member companies - neither group is as open as we are).

Anyway I'm back this week after my partner's surgery and between looking after her while she recovers over the course of the month I'm hoping we can make some good progress quickly. It's in all of our interests to deliver while we still have an opportunity to be relevant as the last thing we want is to end up playing follow the leader (regardless of whether the leader happens to be VMware via DMTF or Amazon with an "open" EC2).

Cheers,

Sam