[occi-wg] Nouns and Verbs (was: Syntax of OCCI API)

[Richard Davies]

Simon Wardley wrote:
> 2. When it comes to stopping and starting servers, aren't these simply
> attributes of the server. Whether its active state is on or off seems
> little different from other attributes of that specific resource.
...
> stopping / starting a server
> {resource_provider/my_id/servers/some_server {update{state attribute}}

This is an interesting question, and one where we've been both ways with
ElasticHosts.

Our current approach is that we use updating attributes wherever an action
is completed before the call returns, and specific action call wherever an
action takes time to handle after the call returns.

For example, we use an update to storage's size attribute to resize storage
(and the resized storage is available immediately).

But on the other hand, we have a specific server shutdown call (rather than
updating the server's state) to send an ACPI shutdown message to a server,
since we know that it will take significant time for the server's OS to
respond to this and shut itself down - during this time period, the server's
status is still 'RUNNING'.

Cheers,

Richard.