[occi-wg] OCCI Dashboard

[shlomo.swidler at gmail.com]

As an end-user, I'm hoping to eventually see an OCCI-aware ElasticFox
(or similar cloud infrastructure provider dashboard) that can be used
to view and manage OCCI deployments. (This may just map to a
collection of use cases.)

I'm comparing the current features of ElasticFox to the features
exposed by the proposed API [1] and I note the following about the
API:

1. There is no Noun or Attribute for "Security Groups". The API should
allow me to define a network security group (consisting of a
collection of protocol+port+CIDR specifications), and allow each
network interface to belong to multiple security groups. There was
some discussion back in May [2] about networking attributes, but it
did not get very far.

2. Amazon has distinct nouns for "Volumes" and "Snapshots". Amazon's
snapshots are not mountable, you can only "copy"/"clone" (not sure
which OCCI verb is the correct one here) an Amazon EBS snapshot into a
new EBS drive. The OCCI API seems to imply that the result of the verb
"image" on a drive yields another drive. So there may be a need to
introduce either a new noun "drive snapshot" that is not linkable to
any compute noun, or to otherwise differentiate between drives that
are mountable and drives that are not mountable.

3. Similar to #2, but more generally: how can I, the OCCI consumer,
know a-priori (without actually doing it) whether the drive that
results from "image"ing an existing drive will be linkable (mountable)
to my compute resources? Because some providers may produce a
full-fledged drive as a result, and some may produce an unmountable
"snapshot". Or, put even more generally, is there some
meta-information I can probe at the OCCI API level to discover the
noun/verb/attribute combinations that are supported by a particular
implementation?

4. How will I be able to discover VM images that are appropriate for
my "compute"s? For example, Amazon has public AMIs that I can launch
on my instances, and I can filter the ElasticFox view to only show me
64-bit AMIs or otherwise filter them by AMI name. Is this use case
covered by OVF, or is it more appropriate at the OCCI level?

Thanks.

.. Shlomo

[1] http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/APIDesign
[2] http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/occi-wg/2009-May/000633.html