[Interoperability] Status update OCCI and summary on SNIA Cloud Plugfest and OGF 32

[florian.feldhaus at tu-dortmund.de]

Hi,

as I promised, here is a status update on our OCCI implementation and a
summary on the outcome of the SNIA Cloud Plugfest and OGF 32:

SNIA Cloud Plugfest (http://www.snia.org/cloud/cloudplugfest)
- The Cloud Plugfest went well, even so the OCCI participation was not as
good as I hoped for. We had some interesting discussions on JSON rendering
for OCCI and on further integration of OCCI and CDMI.
- CDMI is gaining momentum with several implementations showing up and it
looks as if it would be very well suited to be used with OpenNebula. We
have a few students working on combining OpenNebula with CDMI, but we
would be glad to have a chat with the OpenNebula developers what their
visions are in this area. We will probably be able to demonstrate a first
prototype for CDMI integration in OpenNebula during the next Plugfest
which will take place Sep 19 - Sep 22 in Santa Clara.
- We decided to have one of the next Cloud Plugfest in europe, probably
during spring 2012. We still need to figure out the details during one of
the next Plugfest coordination meetings, but I think this could be a great
opportunity to get more people from europe involved.
- On the other hand, remote participation is also received very well. A
chatroom, mailinglist and wiki page have been set up and will be filled
with more details in the future. In the Wiki
(http://plugfest.sniacloud.com/wiki/index.php) we started collecting all
information on existing OCCI + CDMI implementations and on test instance
if available. The main page should be publicly accessible, but there
currently seems to be a problem with the page being protected, but I
already asked for a fix.

OGF 32
- Even so the participation was not optimal, OGF 32 was considered a
success by most people who attended. Regarding OCCI, we had a good
discussion on the integration of OCCI into the Simple API for Grid
Applications (SAGA).
- During a talk by Rick Clark on the status of OpenStack, we had an
interesting discussion on the need of open cloud standards. He also
mentioned the Open Cloud Initiative (http://www.opencloudinitiative.org/)
currently mainly driven by OpenStack, where a participation may be a good
idea. 
- OpenStack is currently revising their API architecture which will help
to bring an OCCI 1.1 implementation to OpenStack towards the end of this
year or beginning of next year.
- Rick Clark was positively surprised about the new features of OpenNebula
3.0 and said to be in or will come back to talks with Ignacio regarding a
closer cooperation between both projects.

Status of OCCI:
- we are close to full OCCI 1.1 compliance, but we are still working on
parsing the requests. We will commit a larger change on handling OCCI
requests, which will incorporate a prototype implementation of a JSON
rendering
- the OCCI framework is working well together with OpenNebula 3.0 beta. We
still need to do lots of testing and iron out a few bugs
- we are working on modularizing the OCCI framework to make it more
reusable. We started writing an OCCI client using the same ruby classes as
the server and we would like to provide a ruby gem in the near future
allowing others to easily create or integrate OCCI clients in their
projects
- We are working hard on a well designed templating system and had a good
discussion on it during the last OCCI WG meeting. We like to finnish EC2
style creation of "small","medium","large" instances as well as OS
templates like "Ubuntu 11.04 64bit" for the next release of the OCCI
framework
- We have some students working on OCCI / CDMI integration and would like
to sync up with the OpenNebula developers on their views of managing
storage. The CDMI integration is currently being considered on two levels.
Once, we GET an Image from a CDMI server and store it in the OpenNebula
image repository. A tighter CDMI integration is being considered by using
the CDMI export protocol feature
(http://cdmi.sniacloud.com/CDMI_Spec/13-Exported_Protocols/13-Exported_Prot
ocols.htm)
- we would like to release a stable version of the OCCI framework soon
after the release of OpenNebula 3.0. Is there already a planned release
date?

I will be on vacation starting this thursday for 2 weeks. After that I'd
be glad to participate in discussions on the future of open standards and
the further roadmap for OpenNebula/OCCI/CDMI/OVF.

Cheers,
Florian