[ogsa-wg] RE: GRIDtoday Edition: Tony Hey: 'Challenging Times for GGF & Standards'

[Mark McKeown]

Hi Savas,

>
> At this point I would like to point out that many UK e-Science (e.g.
> myGrid, Geodise, and many more) and International (e.g. SkyServer)
> projects successfully used existing tooling and simple WS specifications
> (SOAP, WSDL) as their underlying infrastructure. Perhaps with the
> addition of WS-Security, SAML, XACML, and even WS-Addressing (given that
> the entire industry is behind it even though it hasn't be finalised
> yet), we have an infrastructure that can be used in the design of
> high-level services. All these standards (specification in case of
> WS-Addressing) are supported by everyone and commercial, high-quality
> tooling already exists. I am not proposing a definite set of specs (I
> may have forgotten some or some may have to be removed). The OGSA WG
> will have to decide the common set of specs so that everyone is on board
> (even Microsoft). Also, I am not going to restart the 'state' argument
> here but I will point out that even with this simple set of specs large
> companies like Amazon and Google offer access to their data and
> functionality without requiring additional infrastructure (sorry... had
> to mention the 'state' word :-)))

To add some detail:

85% of requests to Amazon Web services use REST

"querying Amazon using REST is 6 times faster than with SOAP"

Reference: http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/php/2003/10/30/amazon_rest.html

Not sure if the numbers are still correct.

cheers
Mark