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

[Alexis Richardson]

Why can't Google be an integration point?  I may be missing something
about how the metamodel and CRUD vs 'pure' REST work here...


On Tue, May 12, 2009 at 11:59 AM, Richard Davies
<richard.davies at elastichosts.com> wrote:
>> > You're focusing not so much Atom the RFC4287 data format, but AtomPub
>> > the RFC5023 publishing protocol as implemented notably in GData and
>> > lots of other places, and do generic Web-resource CRUD where the
>> > resources happen to represent cloud infrastructure objects. *Thus you
>> > outsource most of the work of CRUD specification. *Then, you layer
>> > cloud-specific stuff on top of that. *Then collections of servers and
>> > clusters and networks and so on are perforce represented as Atom Feeds.
>> >
>> > Is that the essence of it? *-Tim
>>
>> Essentially, yes - at least a subset of it (I'm not sure that service
>> and category documents are supported nor required by GData to date) with
>> simple extensions for querying, concurrency/performance and any other
>> implementation issues we come across on the way. I've been focusing on
>> Atom because that's how the data is rendered - AtomPub as you well know
>> tells us how to discover and manipulate the Atom resources on the server.
>
> My biggest concern about the GData-style approach is not XML vs. JSON syntax
> ('angle bracket vs. curly brackets), but whether pulling in the
> GData/AtomPub meta-model is worth it to outsource the CRUD specification.
>
>
> My example of a simple JSON rendering really has two differences from the
> GData-XML approach:
>
> 1) [Less significant] JSON vs. XML syntax ('angle brackets vs. curly
> brackets') - a trivial decision, as demonstrated by the equivalent XML
> http://www.ogf.org/pipermail/occi-wg/2009-May/000526.html
>
> 2) [More significant] Very light meta-model - completely specified at
> http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/SimpleJSONRendering
> versus pulling in the GData meta-model to wrap the cloud infrastructure
> objects.
>
>
> I note that all existing cloud APIs (Amazon, Sun, GoGrid, ElasticHosts,
> etc.) have similarly specified their APIs directly over HTTP rather than
> over a pre-existing meta model.
>
> Whilst Sam is right that GData libraries do exist for many platforms, they
> are not universal and do run to tens of thousands of lines of code*.
>
> Should we really be pulling in a dependency which is this large when we have
> a clear choice not to?
>
> Richard.
>
>
> * Within http://gdata-python-client.googlecode.com/files/gdata-1.3.1.tar.gz
>  "wc -l src/{atom,gdata}/*.py" gives 13.7 kloc.
>
>  Within http://gdata-java-client.googlecode.com/files/gdata-src.java-1.31.1.zip
>  "wc -l java/src/com/google/gdata/*/*.java" gives 33.9 kloc
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