Date: June 2017
Authors: Philippe Merle, Walid Gaaloul, Faiez Zalila
Publication:
Abstract: Cloud providers offer resources as services including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). However, they could potentially offer Everything from hardware to business applications as a Service (XaaS). Today, there is a plethora of heterogeneous cloud offers: public clouds (e.g., Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, etc.) and software stacks to build clouds (e.g., VMware, OpenStack, Docker, etc.). Each offer addresses some cloud service layers but hardly all. This diversity of cloud offers raises the key issue of interoperability between cloud offers. For that purpose, few standardization efforts were conducted during last ten years such as Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF), Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI), Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI), Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP), Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA), and Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI). However, most of these standards partially addresses interoperability in cloud computing on aspects such as portable image format, standard data management/infrastructure/platform interface, and portable cloud application description format. But none of these standards and cloud offers addresses Everything as a Service, except the OCCI specifications defined by Open Grid Forum (OGF). In a nutshell, OCCI is a REpresentational State Transfer (REST) Protocol and API for all kinds of management tasks on any resource as a service. Based on the OCCI standard, the OCCIware funded project (see www.occiware.org) develops an open-source, model-driven, and reference toolchain for managing Everything as a Service with OCCI.
Conference: IEEE Service Conference Federation, Honolulu, Hawaii, USA