New Policy Language from the DMTF
If you have ever had to implement a policy system to automate the management of distributed resources, the first thing you discover is that you need a set of interfaces to the resources that need to be monitored and controlled. Creating such a system can quickly get bogged down as you spend most of your time in creating adapters from your policy system to these resources. You can have the most interesting and sophisticated policies to deploy, but unless they can act against the real world, there is no value to your policy system.
Now that several domains have instrumented their resources with management interfaces based on the DMTF Common Information Model (CIM) (see SMI and SMASH), what was needed was a way to write standard expressions of policy against this common model. Policy was already modeled in CIM, but the model itself is not an intuitive way to write policy. What was really needed was a policy language that would use the semantics of the CIM instrumented resources, but be simple enough that you don't need to be a modeling expert to use it.
For the last year, the DMTF has been working on such a standard in the Policy working group (which I chair). The original specification was submitted by IBM with some help from Cisco. The official press release was posted today, but the actual CIM-SPL specification has been available since February. The SPL stands for "Simplified Policy Language". We hope we have achieved the simplification goal, but if not please let us know through the DMTF Feedback process.
When it comes to implementations of this standard there are a couple already in the works. One is planned for the C++ language, to be embedded in an open source CIMOM. The other is a standalone Java based implementation. Once these implementations get farther along, we will be able to move the standard along to Final status. If you are interested in getting involved in these efforts, please let me know.
