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

Sat Jun 20 14:34:32 CDT 2009

k,

The occi is not inventing new technology like OVF, DMTF, SNIA or any 
other "special" agenda/SDO groups that focus on a specific vendor's or a 
specific technological solution. We are aggregating the work of others, 
you can hardly call that NIH syndrome.

I believe we collectively have shown a desire to have a simpler 
interface, hence the demand and consensus for a RESTful interface 
pattern. We haven't completed the analysis of OVF to the other API 
attributes to make a judgment call to consider its capabilities for our 
effort. There are features or lack of features in OVF that currently 
alienate some providers. I'm sure VMWare would be very happy to be able 
to say the cloud interoperability spec is based on their technology. 
Just let me know when the occi press release comes out and says that. 
I'd like to purchase a bunch of EMC/VMWare stock prior to the press release.

And, complexity does normally increase over time due to a wide variety 
of issue. This commonly occur due the the lack of proper requirements 
aka "the stuff we don't know - we don't know" and hurrying though the 
process, dropping stuff through the cracks.

Its all good...

-gary

Krishna Sankar (ksankar) wrote:
>
> 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 <mailto: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> 
> [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 <mailto: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 
> <mailto: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
>     <mailto: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
>     <mailto:randyb at neotactics.com>
>
>     BLOG: http://cloudscaling.com
>
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