1. Cloud APIs Overview
What they are
How they work
Discussion
Lew Tucker
VP, CTO Cloud Computing
Sun Microsystems, Inc
1/20/2010

2. Computing Economics - P.O.V
● Fall in cost of computing bounded only by the
cost of power
● Commoditization is inevitable and good
● The sustainable value that a provider can
charge for a service will all be above this base
● So, accelerate commoditization of base-level
APIs through agreed upon standards to
accelerate development of higher-level, higher-
value services

3. What Cloud APIs Do
● Application level: SaaS
● Programatic way interact with App
● Very app specific
● Development environment: PaaS
● Application development
● Language/programming model/service specific
● Access to raw compute and storage: IaaS
● Create and manage computational resources
– Typically: virtual, shared, dynamically provisioned
● Lowest level – best chance of standardization
● Large amount of commonality
our focus is here – cloud resources

4. Today each cloud provider makes their own
...and the number is growing
● Today:
● Amazon's AWS set: EC2, S3, SQS, …
● Microsoft's Azure
● Google App Engine
● RackSpace
● VMware Vcloud
● Sun's Cloud API
● GoGrid,
● IBM Developer Cloud API
● Several standards groups, software libraries .........

5. EC2 Query API example
GET:
https://ec2.amazonaws.com/
?Action=RunInstances &ImageId=ami-60a54009 &MaxCount=3
&MinCount=1
&Placement.AvailabilityZone=us-east-1b &...auth parameters...
RESPONSE:
<RunInstancesResponse
xmlns="http://ec2.amazonaws.com/doc/2008-08-08">
<reservationId>r-47a5402e</reservationId>
<ownerId>495219933132</ownerId>
:
<instancesSet>
<item>
<instanceId>i-2ba64342</instanceId>
<imageId>ami-60a54009</imageId>
<instanceState>
<code>0</code>
<name>pending</name>
</instanceState>
<keyName>example-key-name</keyName>
<amiLaunchIndex>0</amiLaunchIndex>
<InstanceType>m1.small</InstanceType>
<launchTime>2007-08-07T11:51:50.000Z</launchTime>
</instancesSet>
</RunInstancesResponse>

6. Feature Set Catalog
http://forge.ogf.org/sf/wiki/do/viewPage/projects.occi-wg/wiki/FeatureMatrix
see Rich Miller's Catalog

7. API Differences
● Language bindings vs http protocols
● Use of HTTP: RESTful vs query vs SOAP
● Authentication
● Resource properties and representations
● Error codes and response handling
● Machine images
● Level of detail and variability of resources

8. Interfaces and Providers
http://architects.dzone.com/news/opennebula-14-challenges

9. Let's start with basic HTTP resource
representations

10. Open Cloud Computing Interface
(Open Grid Forum)
http://forge.ogf.org/sf/projects/occi-wg

11. Cloud Data Management Interface
(SNIA)
CDMI

12. OCCI Example: Get VM
> GET /us-east/webapp/vm01 HTTP/1.1
> User-Agent: occi-client/1.0 (linux) libcurl/7.19.4 OCCI/1.0
> Host: cloud.example.com
> Accept: */*
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
< HTTP/1.1 200 OK
< Content-Type: application/ovf
< Link: </us-east/webapp/vm01;start>;
< rel="http://purl.org/occi/action#start";
< title="Start"
< Link: </us-east/webapp/build.pdf>;
< rel="related";
< title="Documentation";
< type="application/pdf"
< Category: compute;
< label="Compute Resource";
< scheme="http://purl.org/occi/kind#"
< Server: occi-server/1.0 (linux) OCCI/1.0
< Connection: close
<
< <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
...

13. Security Requirements
● Identity, Roles, Access Control, Policies
● Cryptography, Key and Certificate Mgmt
● Network Security
● Data/Storage Security
● Even Auditing and Reporting
● Federation Patterns
● ID, Trust, Access Mgmt, SSO, Audit, Config Mgmt
Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum
http://groups.google.com/group/cloud-computing-use-cases/files

14. The Network is the Computer

15. Clo u d
The Network is the Computer
Are we getting there yet?

16. What's this “cloud” computer like?
● MPP-like distributed system of CPU's, memory,
disks, network, and more
● Programmed through multiple service interfaces
● Physically remote and managed by one or more
rd
3 party providers
● Dynamic allocation of resources as needed
● Accessed according to account priviledges

17. How is it programmed
● Individual nodes programmed using variety of
programming languages, tools, methods.
● OS and applications loaded via virtual machine
images or higher-level constructs (jar, maven,
etc.)
● Administrative interfaces for resource allocation
and management
● Means for expressing application architecture
covering multiple resources and their network
connectivity

18. Discussion:
What is the API for this new Computer?
● Open, common, CC API – of course
● Common vocabulary – ontology (OWL?)
● Directory of services
● Universal machine image format (OVF?)
● Identity (OpenID, multiple?), account and
certificate managment
● Orchestration
● Mgmt of ensembles of resources, reservations
● Service-provider vs customer APIs