[occi-wg] thought on interoperability vs integration

[Alexis Richardson]

Randy,

Thanks very much for your supportive words.

It would be great if you could help the group by spelling out your use
case and need a bit more, since you have users asking you for things
right now.  From what you say below, about a rising tide lifting all
boats, my understanding is that you mean something like this use case:

GoGrid API --- small interop core --- OtherVendor API

If this is correct then how would this work in practice?  It seems to
me that there are three possibilities:

1. You adopt the OtherVendor API, which I assume you don't plan to do

2. You adopt the OCCI API, which would have commonality with other providers

3. You support the OCCI API for interop but provide, e.g., GG specific
APIs and extensions, possibly in several styles

In scenario 2 and 3, the customer can achieve interop with OtherVendor
through the OCCI core.  The big win comes when OtherVendor can be a
large set of providers.

Does this make sense?  I would imagine that some folks would have a
lot of extensions.  For example the DMTF guys have a much broader
scope than OCCI and if we integrated with them, we would not expect
all their private cloud extensions to interoperate with, say, EH, who
are somewhat at the other extreme of public cloud.

alexis








On Mon, May 11, 2009 at 12:49 AM, Randy Bias <randyb at gogrid.com> wrote:
> Alexis,
>
>
>    I found this very enlightening.  I think making the distinction between
> interop and integration is very important.  In retrospect, I can now see
> that while many here have been talking about integration, I've solely been
> focused on interop.  I agree that it is critical to get that piece
> functional ASAP and then begin working on the integration components.
>
>    In fact, I'm even more excited now about the prospect of a very small
> core that could be adopted rapidly across many providers.  This would go
> very far towards encouraging wider adoption much faster, I believe.  GoGrid
> has folks approaching us now who are curious about who they should build to
> first and for many of them Amazon's APIs are the best bet because they are
> the de facto leader.
>
>    Unfortunately, while I wish Amazon the best, as long as there is no
> standard this hurts everyone.  We would rather have a simple
> interoperability API that would in effect be a "tide that lifts all boats",
> even Amazon.
>
>    Thanks again.
>
>
>
> --Randy
>
>
>
> On 5/9/09 11:47 AM, "Alexis Richardson" <alexis.richardson at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hi all,
>>
>> Thanks for a thought-provoking week of emails on the OCCI-WG list.
>> Especially thanks to Sam, Richard, Ben and Tim for laying out a lot of
>> the issues.
>>
>> One link that I found useful was this:
>> http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud where we
>> find the following statement:
>>
>> ---
>> if Cloud technology is going to take off, there¹ll have to be a
>> competitive ecosystem; so that when you bet on a service provider, if
>> the relationship doesn¹t work out there¹s a way to take your business
>> to another provider with relatively little operational pain. Put
>> another way: no lock-in.  ... I got all excited about this back in
>> January at that Cloud Interop session. Anant Jhingran, an IBM VIP,
>> spoke up and said ³Customers don¹t want interoperability, they want
>> integration.² ...  ³Bzzzzzzzzzt! Wrong!² I thought. But then I
>> realized he was only half wrong; anyone going down this road needs
>> integration and interoperability.
>
> --
> Randy Bias, VP Technology Strategy, GoGrid
> randyb at gogrid.com, (415) 939-8507 [mobile]
> BLOG: http://neotactics.com/blog, TWITTER: twitter.com/randybias
>
>