[occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?

Sat Jun 20 13:11:11 CDT 2009

Sam,

a)      I suggest you tone down your rhetoric (unless you have proof
that, that is so) on what other SDOs might be doing ... seek to
understand first ;o) OGF (and GGF) has  long history of working with
others and we do not want to singlehandedly reverse that

b)      This is the standard NIH syndrome

c)       And simpler format usually will get complex as the domain
matures. 

d)      Moreover we can leverage future work done by others as the cloud
computing domain grows and by extension we get more demands for the OCCI
interfaces feature set ...

e)      BTW, why is it difficult to roll an OVF file ? After all it is
an XML file. Are you having second thoughts on XML format ? ;o) Time to
come clean if that is the case !

Cheers

<k/>

From: Sam Johnston [mailto:samj at samj.net] 
Sent: Saturday, June 20, 2009 10:21 AM
To: Michael Behrens
Cc: Krishna Sankar (ksankar); Randy Bias; occi-wg at ogf.org
Subject: Re: [occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?

I'd be surprised if OASIS were working on a new version given it's a
DMTF standard but you're right - it's extensible and it's certainly one
format I expect most, if not all, implementations to support anyway.
DMTF are no doubt very busy rubber stamping VMware's vcloud API at the
moment so I doubt OVF is high on their list of priorities - waiting for
news from Thijs regarding our collaboration with them.

The question then is if we want/need a simpler format ala ElasticHosts:

cores 2
memory 2048
...

We quite probably do (it is after all a fairly simple problem to solve,
as evidenced by the simplicity of your average virtual machine
descriptor), and there are a good few people in support of this. In any
case it would be at least mildly ironic to raise hell over XML in the
protocol only to require it for the data interchange format ;)

Rolling your own OVF file is a bit of a mission compared to sending a
few key value pairs...

Sam

On Sat, Jun 20, 2009 at 6:27 PM, Michael Behrens
<michael.behrens at r2ad.com> wrote:

The OVF standard is extensible, so perhaps start with that and then
extend as needed.  Does anyone know if OASIS is working on a new
version?  If so, then perhaps a runtime/creation use-case could be
submitted.

Krishna Sankar (ksankar) wrote: 

Need to understand a little bit more on this.

a)      Wouldn't it be better to add the missing attributes/elements to
OVF than inventing a new format

b)      The client has to understand something - either OVF or some
other representation. So why not add to OVF ?

c)       Finally, are there something fundamentally missing from/totally
incompatible with OVF that it cannot be fixed ?

Cheers

<k/>

From: occi-wg-bounces at ogf.org [mailto:occi-wg-bounces at ogf.org] On Behalf
Of Sam Johnston
Sent: Thursday, June 18, 2009 4:20 AM
To: Randy Bias
Cc: occi-wg at ogf.org
Subject: Re: [occi-wg] Opinion Poll: IaaS or PaaS ?

On Thu, Jun 18, 2009 at 8:32 AM, Randy Bias <randyb at neotactics.com>
wrote:

	Sure, but that's not the issue.  The issue is VM portability.
It's important, but difficult.  That's my point.  Specifying the
hypervisor of an image just means the cloud has enough foreknowledge to
reject the upload.

Exactly. In fact my main concern is that as OVF is only ever used as a
transport rather than run-time format there are two potentially lossy
transformations (one to bundle up e.g. a VMware virtual machine to OVF
and another to unbundle it to say Hyper-V). Any settings that fall
outside of the OVF net (potentially including critical details such as
interface parameters) will be ignored at best and lost at worst.

If a client wants to make a VM it should not need to understand OVF so
we will have our own, simple descriptor language that I imagine will end
up looking like the stuff in VMX files (example attached). If we are
careful about how we do this we may well be able to solve the VM
portability problem as well - something I'm sure many of the open source
projects would be happy to see.

Sam

	On Jun 14, 2009, at 8:38 PM, Sam Johnston wrote:

	On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 5:05 AM, Randy Bias
<randyb at neotactics.com> wrote:

		   If you don't have this capability then allowing the
upload of completely opaque images and hoping they will have any kind of
reasonable performance on an arbitrary cloud providers system is a pipe
dream.  This is an area badly in need of standardization, but I doubt it
will come any time soon.

	Fortunately specifying the type of hypervisor an image is tied
to/optimised for isn't hard...

	Sam

	Randy Bias, Cloud Strategist
	+1 (415) 939-8507 [m], randyb at neotactics.com

	BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com

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