Occi

Today I participated in the Cloud Standards & Interoperability panel at the IGT2009 conference, together with Shahar Evron of Zend Technologies, and moderated by Reuven Cohen. Reuven gave an overview of his involvement with various governments on the efforts to define and standardize “cloud”, and Shahar presented an overview of the Zend Simple Cloud API (for PHP). I presented an overview of the Open Grid Forum’s Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI). The slides include a 20,000-foot view of the specification, a 5,000-foot view of the specification, and an eye-level view in which I illustrated the metadata travelling over the wire using the HTTP Header rendering. ...

You’re a developer writing applications that use the cloud. Your code manipulates cloud resources, creating and destroying VMs, defining storage and networking, and gluing these resources together to create the infrastructure upon which your application runs. You use an API to perform these cloud operations - and this API is specific to the programming language and to the cloud provider you’re using: for example, for Java EC2 applications you’d use typica, for Python EC2 applications you’d use boto, etc. But what’s happening under the hood, when you call these APIs? How do these libraries communicate with the cloud? What language does the cloud speak? ...