All about Grid and Cloud Computing: Discover the limits

It have been some busy weeks. But great things have happen over the past weeks. The OCCI working group which tries to deliver one of the first standards in the cloud community is moving along very well. We have almost finished our first document describing the use cases and requirements for a Cloud API. This API should be capable of deploying, managing and monitoring virtual workloads (like virtual machines) in a Cloud. The draft can be found on our website: http://www.occi-wg.org. BTW there is a small one-pager describing OCCI. The draft of the specification can also be found on the OCCI website.

Next to that the cloud community is engaging to work together on cloud standards. The wiki on http://cloud-standards.org shows this. There is a nice overview (which might need some refinement) demonstrating where which standard might apply (I took if from the Wiki so it might be outdated).

Overall it seems that the work from SNIA, DMTF and OGF is coming together pretty nicely. For the last days I have been working on presentations and papers to present the work done in OCCI and RESERVOIR. For example a paper forcloudcomp 09 describing howto use OCCI to get RESERVOIR and the SLA@SOI project interoperate. Also upcoming are talks about RESERVOIR, the Cloud in general and OCCI at GridKa school, Sun HPC workshop and other smaller events. Also a poster about the Cloud and the Sun Grid Engine, Service Domain Manager and RESERVOIR is on its way. So great times to be in the clouds...

This is probably the last blog entry which comes live from OGF26. OGF 26 has been great with interesting talks and group meetings. As said OGF wants to take a leadership role in manging the collaborations about Cloud standards. 

The security talks have been interesting as well as sessions about Green IT, SAGA (A Simple API for Grid Applications) and JSDL (Job Submission Description Language). next to that there was a lot of talk about Cloud computing. And thanks to OCCI OGF has a great chance to get some great stuff going on. So stay tuned :-)

Here are some last impressions from OGF:

The Friday Center...

Lunch break

Prior to the OCCI group meeting

Some paper work :-)

We are already in the second day of the OGF meeting. Nevertheless the first day has been interesting and full of information. This time not so many attendees are here in Chapel Hill. Which makes this meeting more a working meeting than a collaboration meeting like last OGF.

Still I got some great feedback about the work done in OCCI. And it somehow comes to my mind that it can be indeed a big thing to happen. I'll be giving a presentation and introduction of OCCI tomorrow in our working group meeting. Other presenters will also show their works and thoughts on Clouds - so stay tuned! The slides will be available.

A great session yesterday was hosted by Craig Lee, himself President of OGF, about the strategic position of OGF. He talked a lot about OGF relation towards Clouds and that OGF has a great standpoint with OCCI. But there is a need for collaboration with other Standard efforts like those from SNIA and DMTF. Therefor OGF will trigger this and work on collaboration. Next to that a OGF representative will be available at the main Cloud summits and conference to present this view.

Next to that here are some impressions from OGF. Watch closely to the Jelly Beans I got here during coffee break :-)

 Craig Lee present some slides at the opening session.

Nice slides about Clouds and Grids.

Great diet!

Finally after some time now the Open Cloud Computing Interface working group became official. We will focus on the creation of an API for remote management of 'Infrastructure as a Service' based clouds. 

The latest charter can be found here: http://forge.ogf.org/sf/projects/occi-wg. That is also the link to our working space in the internet. The official webpage is: http://www.occi-wg.org.

So feel free to join, hop on the project and get involved in the creation of one of the first standards in Cloud Computing.