[occi-wg] Missing use case ? Unconfigured Cloud Assets

[Gary Mazz]

Hi All,

I think I came on a scenario which has not been addressed in any other 
Use Case works.

There may be circumstances where unconfigured resources are provisioned 
for a cloud consumer outside of  OCCI.  Unconfigured resources may be 
storage or network resources which are provisioned but not assigned to 
any compute resource. These resources may be created though provider 
"back office" utilities, or though other cloud management interfaces, 
including SNIA's CDMI or IaaS cloud providers' native interfaces. 

OCCI does not have a way to report "provisioned" but still unconfigured 
resources.

I'm proposing a new type of resource identified as "group", it's an 
organizational construct more than a traditional OCCI IaaS resource. The 
"group" does not infer any specific organization for its membership, 
such as a hierarchy or a network. The "group" indicates the existence of 
a relationship between the members and provides a name space, via 
attributes, to identify and address the membership as an atomic unit. 
Though attributes, we can define the role of the group, where it can 
represent unconfigured resources, administrative accounts, providing 
organization structure for administrators or other unforeseen aspects of 
evolving cloud provider implementations. Imposing a hierarchal  
relationship between the  group and its membership,  provides a direct 
mapping  to canonical URI forms described in the OCCI specification..

I've been hesitant proposing the introduction of an abstract 
organizational entity into OCCI and resisted pushing it as an agenda 
item, especially due to the late point in the game.  Considering the 
recent adoption of "consumer defined attributes" into the specification, 
IMO the introduction of "group"s is an important descriptive capability 
for representing IaaS cloud provider implementations.  Again IMO,  the 
proposal for adoption of this new capability and the technical details 
warrants further email discussion.

cheers,
gary