[occi-wg] vCloud architecture diagrams

[Sam Johnston]

This is (unsurprisingly) really raising the bar. FWIW I'm not one of the
people who's seen the API so it's interesting to see they too went for OVF
over a REST based API... it seems that OVF is in fact at the heart of this
protocol (or is it vice versa?). That may or may not be a good thing.

Object model looks like this (courtesy pp59):

   - Organisation
      - Virtual Data Center (VDC)
         - vApp (multiple VMs, "internal" network, n-tier app in a box)

Other observations:

   - Flexible networking (like ours) - multiple tagged networks ("foo",
   "bar", "VDCnet", "Public", "Private")
   - Persistent VMs (we want to allow for both)
   - SLA on vApp (to be implemented as an extension)
   - Overprovisioning (interesting area, from user PoV means hiding size of
   storage pools, etc. which most providers will want to do anyway)
   - Both serialization and configuration via OVF
   - Talk about scaling to 10k hosts and 100k VMs
   - "HTTP based resource oriented interface" (just like OCCI!)
   - "All the characteristics of the WWW
   • Extensible without breaking client. (like OCCI)
   • Client only has to know about what it cares about. (like OCCI)
   • Can route, proxy, cache <- interesting, useful, can be difficult to
   achieve
   - Interestingly uses Spring
Framework<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spring_Framework>
      - Injects dependencies and wires together Spring beans
      - Forces programmer into maintainable design pattern; isolates
      dependencies
   - OSGI: Standard dynamic module framework (Global registry of interfaces
   to instances - Dynamically load, unload, start, stop bundle)... not sure how
   interesting this is really
   - JMS publish/subscribe messaging bus isolates end points (message buses
   will be a key component of most successful cloud architectures IMO -
   something to consider when we're talking about formatting)
   - Hibernate simplifies DB code & DB independence

The actual VMware architecture (pp76) I found less interesting because it
varies from provider to provider and is the detail that the cloud conceals
from end users.

Sam

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 9:49 AM, Alexis Richardson <
alexis.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:

> Wes,
>
> Thanks for that.
>
> Some of us have seen vCloud APIs under NDA.  There is definitely
> overlap with OCCI.  VMware are aware of OCCI and I personally hope we
> see them contribute at some stage.
>
> alexis
>
>
> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 11:06 PM, Wes Felter <wesley at felter.org> wrote:
> > VMware has revealed few technical details about vCloud, but I found this
> > public presentation containing some interesting diagrams starting on
> > pages 50 and 76. Overall, the concepts appear similar to the work going
> > on in OCCI.
> >
> > http://forum.stanford.edu/events/2009Plenary/Orran%20Kriegar.pdf
> >
> > The bullets "Researchers can replace any part of the service." and
> > "Researchers can replace the entire implementation
> > and clone the API" also caught my eye.
> >
> > Wes Felter - wesley at felter.org
> > _______________________________________________
> > occi-wg mailing list
> > occi-wg at ogf.org
> > http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/occi-wg
> >
> _______________________________________________
> occi-wg mailing list
> occi-wg at ogf.org
> http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/occi-wg
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/occi-wg/attachments/20090425/551bbf65/attachment.html