Hi List,
Here are some notes from a call we held today regarding OCCI and message queue technology, specifically AMQP.
Attendees:
Ross Cooney – StormMQ
Eamon Walshe – StormMQ
David Wragg – RabbitMQ
Thijs Metsch -- OCCI
Andy Edmonds -- OCCI
Thijs gave us a full outline of the OCCI project and in particular the existing HTTP communication system.
It was agreed that HTTP was a perfect fit for this management interface because:
1) HTTP is widely adopted, easy to use and well documented
2) HTTP interfaces are widely supported and HTTP resources are widely used by vendors in this space
3) HTTP is easy to parse, troubleshoot and extend
It was also agreed that HTTP is not good at asynchronous communication and to get this to work properly often involves complicated polling mechanisms that are not optimal. Any message queue technology would help here...including AMQP.
The advantages of developing an AMQP communications module that would sit beside the HTTP module as an option are:
1) Asynchronous communication would be trivial
2) AMQP would allow you to sent a request and get any number of responses (for example a single request to start 100 VM’s could wait for all 100 responses from the VM’s)
3) Complicated HTTP polling mechanisms would be a thing of the past
4) Additional functionality might be added in the future
So, while advantageous, it was also felt that there isn’t a groundswell of interest from adopters of OCCI to develop an AMQP communications module...put simply, it would be a nice thing to have, but at this stage nobody particularly wants it ;)
However, we discussed the area of network or resource monitoring and felt that this would suit a message queue perfectly. It was agreed that while outside the scope of the OCCI remit, robust system monitoring is a prerequisite to wide scale cloud adoption.
StormMQ is working on a AMQP based monitoring application that we plan to release as an open source project. Ross and Eamon from StormMQ will feed back to the group when this is available and perhaps this may be of interest to OCCI.
Ross Cooney
Commercial Director
StormMQ Limited
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