Hello everyone, since OGF42 in London is rapidly approaching, I would like to start a discussion ... to get a running start. The following issues/questions/suggestions are mostly based on our practical experience with OCCI in EGI FedCloud. Feel free to comment (or ignore me) :-) Items are ordered by importance. 1.) OS and resource templates (mixins -> resources) While moving to production in the last few months, we've found that os_tpl and resource_tpl mixins do not provide enough information about the "resources" (images and flavors in OpenStack, virtual machine templates in OpenNebula etc.) they represent. I know that this is a quite common approach adopted for instance by Amazon in AWS EC2 but in some environments we need to be able to "attach" more information to these concepts. In general, the following information is required: os_tpl: external appliance ID resource_tpl: number of cores, amount of memory, amount/type of storage, included optional block devices Term and scheme of a mixin simply do not provide a strong-enough mechanism. At the moment, we have to use external mapping mechanisms (an LDAP-based information system) and therefore duplicate information in several places. It would be very helpful to be able to attach arbitrary attributes to os_tpls and resource_tpls. Perhaps specify them as resources instead of mixins and use linking to attach them to compute instances (inline, on creation)? Do you have any other ideas? 2.) Advanced networking concepts This will be very brief and vague. Do you have any plans to represent various networking elements (routers, switches, gateways, etc.) in the standard? Or, in general, extend the infrastructure network specification to include tools for specifying complex network setups? 3.) Available resources Are there any plans for including concepts and querying mechanisms for getting the amount of currently available resources? Is this outside of the scope of OCCI or the commonly accepted concept of the "cloud"? How would you handle this? Would it fall into OCCI Monitoring? I'm thinking in terms of "How many 'resource_tpl#small' computes can I launch right now?". 4.) Asynchronous/queued actions Is there a recommended approach to asynchronous or queued actions (not necessarily OCCI "actions")? This goes mostly to implementation. Should I block until the action is finished? Can I respond with HTTP 202 Accepted (for example, it doesn't have to be HTTP) and process it later? In that case, shouldn't I provide a link where the user can get the current status of his action? Did anyone deal with a similar problem? Is there a solution you would prefer, standard-wise? 5.) Updating mixins When using a partial update to add/replace a mixin (or mixins) on a compute instance (as an example), how do I know which mixin to replace? Or whether to replace it or add a new one? Shouldn't OCCI specify which mixin types can be included only once per instance? Or define some "replacing" rules? I'm looking at [1], to give you a practical reference. [1] https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/Occi#Scale_Up_a_VM Any feedback will be greatly appreciated. We can, of course, continue the conversation next week in London. Hope to see you all there. Thanks! Cheers, Boris Parak --- On behalf of EGI FedCloud, CESNET and the rOCCI dev team