Howdy guys--
First, congrats to everyone for doing awesome with Deltacloud and the
launch. Jeremy, the website looks fantastic. Kim and the Video team
also made us all look good.
I'd like us to consider what the "end-game" of Deltacloud as an API
looks like. Where do we draw the line of what is and is not
Deltacloud, from an API viewpoint?
I personally think that we might want to leverage the community
that'll also be building around REST-* (
http://jboss.org/reststar).
There, the intent it to build RESTful APIs (but not necessarily
implementations) for things like messaging, transactions, and storage.
Basically, for things like Amazon's Simple Queueing Service (SQS) and
SimpleDB. Implementation of these things using JBoss technologies
falls under the scope of my JBoss Cloud project. JBoss Cloud (as you
may or may not know) aims to make JBoss middleware "cloud-ready". So
far that's meant getting JBoss AS up in a PaaS configuration "in the
cloud" with clustering and such. Furthering that, I aim to get HonetQ
(our messaging service) and Infinispan (our data-grid project) up as
RESTful, cloud-ready services. To directly respond to SQS and SimpleDB.
I'm going to be working with REST-* on those efforts.
Where does that leave Deltacloud? I think it leaves Deltacloud Just
Fine. Deltacloud addresses the IaaS level of abstraction, which is at
least a level lower than REST-* seems to want to address.
Deltacloud Framework can certainly aim to tie it all together, also.
We can have drivers that work with my HonetQ-REST impl of REST-
Messaging, and a driver to map to Amazon's SQS (or another provider's
"native" queue cloud-service).
Portall, likewise, can continue to overlay policy and other value-add
on top of the "bare" protocols.
Leaving us with
Deltacloud-API --
defining IaaS-level interactions
REST-* (Messaging, Transactions, Storage) --
defining the "cloud services" offered as Services-as-a-Service
defining how we'd like to see Messaging, Transaction, Storage, and
whatever-else servicey things. This is potentially an open-ended
porftolio of specs.
Deltacloud-Portal/Proxy --
consumes Deltacloud-API and REST-* standards, orchestrates the actual
coordination of mixed on-premise/off-premise/private/public resources
according to user-supplied policy.
Perhaps, if needed, Deltacloud-Messaging could extend the basic REST-
Messaging API defined through the REST-* community if an cloud-
specific extensions are needed.
-Bob