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

[Richard Davies]

Tim Bray wrote:
> 3. General advice on making standards
> 
> 3.1 Dare to do less.  Consider Gall's Law.  Try to hit 80/20 points.   
> Build "The simplest thing that could possibly work".  When in doubt,  
> leave it out.

This is my major concern with the route which OCCI has been heading to date.

When the group was set up, I understood that our aim was to quickly write
down and agree the common core between existing IaaS APIs: Amazon, Sun,
GoGrid, ElasticHosts, etc.

We've done some work in that direction (the nouns, verbs and attributes),
but have also proposed a lot which would be going beyond what any/most
IaaSes have actually implemented to date.

For example: embedding of OVF, proposed extensions such as a search service,
billing and reporting.


We shouldn't be working on these - we should stick to 3 nouns, ~15 verbs,
~15 attributes (of which we have a good draft) and should wrap these in the
simplest possible wire format (e.g. fix actuator URLs for each verb.
Represent nouns as a single level JSON hash listing the attributes as
key-value pairs).

See the ElasticHosts application/json format at
http://www.elastichosts.com/products/api for how simple this can be (or
equivalently GoGrid, Sun, etc. - though I believe that Sun's JSON has
unnecessarily deep data structures).


Then we should declare victory and go home!

Richard.