[occi-wg] Future OCCI extensibility: compute, storage, network, service, application

[Richard Davies]

Sm Johnston wrote:
> Is it obvious to anyone else what the next resource extensions after
> compute, network and storage should be? Is there still someone who needs
> convincing that we need to have extensibility at the heart of the protocol
> and build incrementally?

and elsewhere:
> billing, SLAs, monitoring, etc.
...
> <deployment of applications>


I do understand that extensibility is important, but believe we're running a
long way ahead of ourselves here.

I believe that compute, storage and networking can be standardized and
adopted today, but that anything else is likely years off.

Even with just compute, storage and networking, if OCCI gets adoption and is
genuinely interoperable, then we have a massive win. Today even a simple
call like "start server" is different on every IaaS public cloud.

Topics like billing, SLAs, monitoring, etc. are issues which we won't be
able to standardize for a long time yet. Whilst most public clouds do have
these capabilities, they use take noticeably different approaches to them
(compare Amazon vs. GoGrid vs. ElasticHosts on billing, for instance).
More importantly, none of these actually expose any of these topics through
their APIs, so any attempt to produce a standard API will be very premature
for some time to come.

So, for me a tight specification of compute, storage and networking with
good interoperability is much more important than any detailed thinking
about extensions (though obviously we should have some rough concept on how
extensions would fit in when they come).

Cheers,

Richard.