Comments on: Innovation and OpenStack: Lessons from HTTP

By: rhelmin

rhelmin — Sat, 29 Oct 2011 09:41:49 +0000

Hi and hello,

thank You and The firm/team for an excellent distro.

Here are my requests (if managable?) :

- using Your Ubu as a TV -> firmware -> software (Kaffeine worked) – default app/settings in the future…?
- email client which works with One’s organization’s MS Exchange Server 2010…

Thank You very much for years bygone and years to come…
BR. risto

By: Addressing OpenStack API equality: rethinking API via implementation over specification « Rob Hirschfeld's Blog

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 17:06:08 +0000

[...] subject of much public debate on the OpenStack lists, at the conference and online (Wilamuna & Shuttleworth). So far, I have held back from the community discussion because I think both sides are being [...]

By: Lococast.net Episode 21: OLF recap and there will be rants! « Lococast.net

Lococast.net Episode 21: OLF recap and there will be rants! « Lococast.net — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:59:49 +0000

[...] Mark Shuttleworth on Cloud APIs are like HTTP, don't screw it up. [...]

By: Soren

Soren — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 11:46:48 +0000

Hi, Mark.

This is an interesting, important and difficult discussion. I’ve probably started to reply to this post 5 times, but always end up changing my mind halfway through.

I believe I understand the value of the EC2 API. I’ve put quite a bit of effort into its implementation in OpenStack, but there’s still lots of work to be done for sure and I think it should be a priority. EC2 has plenty of interesting features that we should be adding and that could keep us busy for a long time.

However, we have people today who want to add really interesting features to OpenStack that have no counterpart in EC2 (most notably in the networking area). While we certainly could extend our implementation of the EC2 API to expose this functionality, it’s extremely unlikely that when Amazon gets around to adding similar concepts they will do so by exposing an API identical to what we’ve built. Years from now, if OpenStack becomes as ubiquitous as we’d like, then things might be different. We might be in a position to call the shots and innovate independently of or even in cooperation with Amazon.

Right now, that’s just not the case.

I’d be happy to explore adding a special “openstack” version to the EC2 API (any EC2 API request includes a version identifier denoting which version of the API your client implements) which has these extra concepts, but the “native” OpenStack API isn’t going away.

By: Ofir Nachmani

Ofir Nachmani — Thu, 15 Sep 2011 15:58:14 +0000

Mark – Great article.
In a series of blog posts about Cloud Lock-In I relate to the different layers of the cloud i.e. I P and S. – I think that the following is relevant to the discussion here –

“As a market leader, Amazon AWS will be (already is) followed by other IaaS vendors. Those will solve the same scalability and operational issues by the same sense and logic of AWS. Basically this means an evolution of IaaS platform standards. Smart cloud integration layer will enable “plug & play” a different IaaS platform or even orchestrate several in parallel. To strengthen my point I bring as an example several cloud start-ups (solving IaaS issues such as governance, usage and security) that developed their product to solve issues for Amazon AWS consumers and seriously target support of other IaaS vendors’ platforms such as Rackspace cloud and vCloud. In regards to lock-in the public cloud is great !”

By: Gilbert Pilz

Gilbert Pilz — Wed, 14 Sep 2011 22:40:20 +0000

The DMTF has just published Work In Progress versions of its Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) specs: http://dmtf.org/standards/cloud. Though not the first IaaS-level standard (OCCI likes to claim that), CIMI is more like AWS/EC2 in its model and approach.

By: Arnal Dayaratna: Canonical Founder Endorses Amazon Web Services APIs As Standard Cloud API

Wed, 14 Sep 2011 17:58:32 +0000

[...] a blog post last Thursday, Canonical's founder Mark Shuttleworth advocated that OpenStack, the open source [...]

By: Canonical Founder Mark Shuttleworth Endorses AWS APIs As Standard Cloud API | Cloud Computing Today

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:16:13 +0000

[...] a blog post last Thursday, Canoncial’s founder Mark Shuttleworth advocated that OpenStack, the open source [...]

By: srinivas v

srinivas v — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 12:52:48 +0000

With Gnome3 and all its api’s already existing. New developers were paid to develop a counter shell for it. It would have been more easier if the gnome shell would have been customized to canonical’s taste and then forced it down the gnome3 devs throat if it found popular use. Now with other “cloud” related products trying to innovate, they are being stifled and bulldozed into using common api’s which U like and think are the most optimum. Two products two different strategies. kudos.

By: Kapil Thangavelu

Kapil Thangavelu — Sun, 11 Sep 2011 10:08:47 +0000

@mark well said, and agreed. i remember arguing about innovation from rackspace in the cost benefit + api effectiveness.. but the market is clear. additionally paas pricing costs @ scale (esp with recent appengine changes) argue pretty effectively for the aws api with iaas with opensource automation as a win for most orgs. azure is also interesting an alternative public api. re aws, the degree to which large commercial entities can implement the aws api, without legal consideration, will be in doubt till there’s a public statement on the manner. wrt to openstack, aws compatibility seems to lack a champion willing to implement.

@monty, thorsten.. aws is the sql of the cloud, sure there are many datahbase implementation specific features and eccentricities.. but they do so against a common standard of operation. the basic cloud operations have been abstracted across by several projects… but the reality seems they do so at the expansion to so many marginal implementations of the aws feature set, they require breaking the abstraction to get to a useful production feature set that goes beyond a basic virtual machine api. the occi initiative could be interesting, but its innovation beyond a simple virtualization api is at glacial speeds.

@monty.. re ip concerns.. its valid, but the reality is there is already a vc backed company with products based soley around providing an opensource implementation of the aws api for years.