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

[Alexis Richardson]

We could send him the current write-up.

Thijs - do you think you could do that?


On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 9:56 PM, <shlomo.swidler at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> occi-wg mailing list
> occi-wg at ogf.org
> http://www.ogf.org/mailman/listinfo/occi-wg
>
>