VMTN Blog

Rod Haywood took the time to write up a transcript of last week's vCloud podcast. Since there isn't a lot yet written about the details of our vCloud initiative, this makes for good reading. He also has some great notes and thoughts on the VDC-OS podcast. Here's a quick section about the new REST-style vCloud APIs we're working on:  Musings of Rodos: Transcript of "All about the vCloud" podcast from VMTN.

So compared to the VIM APIs if you wanted to any type of rich operation, lets say provision a new machine, that could have four or five discrete steps to it, some of them could be synchronous, some could be asynchronous, you would have to coble together the work flow of things and map out the dependencies and trap the error conditions in case one of them didn't come through. What we have done is boil these things up to much simpler course grained operations so you can provision a machine through one call, sit on your response code and deal with an error code due to something such as a lack of billing information to make that provision or what ever else might be the case. But we are definitely trying to make it a much simpler way to very immediately pull together services that would sit on top of that infrastructure. The scope of the API at this point is working on making sure we cover all your basic infrastructure operations so provisioning of machines, all your basic state transitions, capturing inventory of what you have, we have added a couple of new containers that we think are helpful for people managing infrastructure, so that people can take a larger pool of infrastructure and chop it up, so if the case was you are a large company and you wanted to make a volume purchase of capacity you could then chunk it up and hand it off to business units for individual projects and then manage it in those individual containers. We will be pushing out the documentation for everybody to start engaging with and providing feedback at the end of the first quarter next year.