Introducing the Oracle Cloud API

Oracle recently published a Cloud management API on OTN and also submitted a subset of the API to the new DMTF Cloud Management working group. The OTN specification, titled “Oracle Cloud Resource Model API”, is available here. In typical DMTF fashion, the DMTF-submitted specification is not publicly available (if you have a DMTF account and are a member of the right group you can find it here). It is titled the “Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model” and is essentially the same as the OTN version, minus sections 9.2, 9.4, 9.6, 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10 (I’ll explain below why these sections have been removed from the DMTF submission). Here is also a slideset that was recently used to present the submitted specification at a DMTF meeting.

 

So why two documents? Because they serve different purposes. The Elemental Resource Model, submitted to DMTF, represents the technical foundation for the IaaS layer. It’s not all of IaaS, just its core. You can think of its scope as that of the base EC2 service (boot a VM from an image, attach a volume, connect to a network). It’s the part that appears in all the various IaaS APIs out there, and that looks very similar, in its model, across all of them. It’s the part that’s ripe for a simple standard, hopefully free of much of the drama of a more open-ended and speculative effort. A standard that can come out quickly and provide interoperability right out of the gate (for the simple use cases it supports), not after years of plugfests and profiles. This is the narrow scope I described in an earlier rant about Cloud standards: