[occi-wg] Is OCCI the HTTP of Cloud Computing?

[Sam Johnston]

Chris,

I think we made good progress in today's call and addressed many of the
issues that Andy and Richard had (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 4:34 PM, Chris Webb <chris.webb at elastichosts.com>wrote:

> It's a great shame Ben hasn't joined the occi-wg so far. I'd like to put on
> the record my strong agreement with his points quoted above. I share his
> horror at the idea of accessing a simple API to a simple service via two
> layers of complex container formats, and agree that there has been no
> technical argument for this other than vague and thoroughly unconvincing
> references to 'enterprise users' and 'extensibility'.
>

I'd love to see Ben, Tim and all the other [potential] stakeholders involved
as well and hope/suspect they will be before long.

To clarify, nobody's talking about "two layers of complex container
formats", rather HTTP (which is assumed - I don't think there's any
contention whatsoever about building on top of HTTP; at least there
shouldn't be) and a very light layer of XML soley to provide sufficient
common metadata for all resources (id, title, updated, etc.) as well as a
mechanism to realise our model by way of links (with attributes on both the
resources and the links between them). I assure you that if you were to try
to do this from scratch in XML (as Andy suggested on the call) you will end
up with something just like Atom anyway (I know because I did go through
this very exercise), and that if it cannot be represented cleanly and
completely in JSON and/or TXT formats then it will not be included... this
places significant restrictions/controls on what is possible.

I'd like to be able to give you better reasoning than I have already but
what I'm trying to do is deliver enough standardisation for interoperability
without stifling innovation... I don't plan to bury anything in the content
element but if some enterprise user wants to take advantage of some of the
work done over the last 10 years, be it WS-*, CIM, OVF or something to be
developed at e.g. SNIA then that's fine by me... I certainly don't want to
stop them or force them to implement multiple protocols to get the stuff
done that we chose not to cover.

And then of course there's the value of both [potentially] being able to get
Google on board and taking advantage of their many thousands of man hours
invested in GData clients already (simply by submitting patches to handle
multiple namespaces).

I'm going to leave you guys to it for a few hours while I take a train to
Paris, but very much appreciate your involvement and the lively discussion,

A bientôt,

Sam
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