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.
