OGF Open Cloud Computing Interface Working Group

Have a look at our Open Cloud Computing Interface specification and provide us your comments: http://www.ogf.org/gf/docs/?public_comment

Cloud computing currently is covered by three models offering Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS), which all involve the on-demand delivery of computing resources. There are a growing number of providers offering IaaS solutions for elastic capacity, whereby server “instances” are executed in their proprietary infrastructure and billed on a utility computing basis (typically virtual machines on a per instance per hour basis). There are also a number of commercial and open source products which seek to replicate this functionality in-house while exposing compatible interfaces so as “hybrid cloud” operating environments can be created.

The Open Grid Forum Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) working group will deliver an API specification for remote management of cloud computing infrastructure, allowing for the development of interoperable tools for common tasks including deployment, autonomic scaling and monitoring. The scope of the specification will be all high level functionality required for the life-cycle management of virtual machines (or workloads) running on virtualization technologies (or containers) supporting service elasticity. The Charter of the WG is available from OGF SourceForge.

The new API for interfacing “IaaS” Cloud computing facilities will allow for:

• Consumers to interact with cloud computing infrastructure on an ad-hoc basis (e.g. deploy, start, stop, restart)
• Integrators to offer advanced management services
• Aggregators to offer a single common interface to multiple providers
• Providers to offer a standard interface that is compatible with available tools
• Vendors of grids/clouds to offer standard interfaces for dynamically scalable service delivery in their products