[occi-wg] Comparison of Amazon, GoGrid, Sun, and RackSpace Cloud APIs

[shlomo.swidler at gmail.com]

William Vambenepe of Oracle published this comparison of the above four
Cloud Infrastructure APIs today:
http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/863

He mostly focuses on how RESTful each one is, but I think his conclusions
will not surprise this WG:

Wouldn’t it be nice to just use a Web browser to navigate HTML pages
> representing the different Cloud resources? Could I use these resource
> representations to create mashups tying together current configuration,
> metrics history and events from wherever they reside? In other words, could
> I throw away my IT management console because all the pages it laboriously
> generates today would exist already in the ether, served by the controllers
> of the resources. Or rather as a mashup of what is served by these
> controllers. Such that my IT management console is really “in the cloud”,
> meaning not just running in somebody else’s datacenter but rather assembled
> on the fly from scattered pieces of information that live close to the
> resources managed. And wouldn’t this be especially convenient if/when I use
> a “federated” cloud, one that spans my own datacenter and/or multiple Cloud
> providers? The scalability of REST could then become more relevant, but more
> importantly its mashup-friendliness and location transparency would be
> essential.
>
> This, to me, is the intriguing aspect of using REST for IT/Cloud
> management. This is where the Sun Cloud API would beat the EC2 API. Tim says
> that in the Sun Cloud “the router is just a big case statement over
> URI-matching regexps”. Tomorrow this router could turn into five different
> routers deployed in different locations and it wouldn’t change anything for
> the API user. Because they’d still just follow URLs. Unlike all the others
> APIs listed above, for which you know the instance ID but you need to
> somehow know which controller to talk to about this instance. Today it
> doesn’t matter because there is one controller per Cloud and you use one
> Cloud at a time. Tomorrow? As Tim says, “the API doesn’t constrain the
> design of the URI space at all” and this, to me, is the most compelling
> long-term reason to use REST. But it only applies if you use it properly,
> rather than just calling your whatever-over-HTTP interface RESTful. And it
> won’t differentiate you in the short term.


Can anyone here solicit his feedback on our API?

.. Shlomo
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