From a technical perspective, ovf4one is an OCCI to OCA gateway, translating RESTful OCCI calls into OCA RESTful calls and the OVF XML message is translated into OpenNebula VM templates. This project has been realised as part of Venus-C EU project.

Demonstration of OCCI on OpenStack from dizz on Vimeo.

Topics to be discussed include:

• What is OCCI and its goals?
• Where does OCCI fit the OpenStack picture?
• How should OpenStack address “extra” APIs?
• Q&As

The session will be on Wednesday at 4.30pm.in the Golden Gate room.

rOCCI as mentioned in our last blog post, is the OCCI implementation that powers the work which enables OCCI interoperability with Amazon EC2.

Work on rOCCI started as part of the EU FP7 project SLA@SOI under the working name OGF-OCCI in early 2011. The goal was to develop an OCCI 1.1 compliant server which initially supports OpenNebula and can later be easily extended to support other Cloud Frameworks. As OpenNebula offered a robust Ruby API binding, it was decided to develop the project in Ruby as well. Soon after work on the implementation started it was accepted as an official OpenNebula Ecosystem project.

Interoperability with other implementations of the OCCI standard was ensured by taking part in testing sessions during the SNIA Cloud Plugfests and using OCCI compliance tools such as the OCCI ANTLR Grammar and the DoYouSpeakOCCI tool. For the last Plugfest taking place at the end of February 2012, the project was renamed to rOCCI in order to distinguish it from the name of the standard (OGF-OCCI).

The current architecture of rOCCI is shown in the following overview:

Current features include:

• Full OCCI 1.1 support
• Experimental support for EC2 (current development version)
• Easy deployment in an Nginx or Apache webserver by using Phusion Passenger
• Usage of the official OCCI ANTLR grammer for parsing / validation
• Passing the DoYouSpeakOCCI Compliance Testing Facility
• Support for the current draft of the OCCI JSON rendering specification
• Modular, easy to extend backend management
• Support for OpenNebula 3.0 and 3.2
• Dummy backend for testing
• Support for HTTP basic authentication
• Experimental support for X.509 certificate authentication (current development version)

Home of rOCCI

rOCCI on GitHub

Follow @r_OCCI

Screencast EC2 in rOCCI from Max Günther on Vimeo.

This is a big vote of confidence in our work which was echoed by the UK G-Cloud report. Being picked up by the German government is obviously kudos to the community’s work, especially as it shows OCCI as a leader of current Cloud standardisation activities.

Lately, OCCI has received a lot of attention: the leading open-source cloud computing software stack implements it, a commercially focused project and related companies builds its whole ecosystem around it, the largest eInfrastructure provider in Europe endorses it, and many other things are ongoing around it.

The study identifies 19 standardisation organisations as “leading”, among which well-known international ones such as ISO, NIST, SNIA, and DMTF are listed next to OGF, the home of OCCI, and other European ones, such as ETSI and BITKOM.

Regarding standards, the report features “20 prototypical cloud standards [that] serve as models, […] and are greatly respected by experts”. Looking at this in detail, it is hugely encouraging to see that OCCI is considered to be the one with the greatest importance (together with OpenStack, which is on the way of speaking OCCI as well, and OAuth, which is orthogonal): the matrix above shows the classification by Booz and Partners on behalf of the BMWi. If you take a look on the upper right, you’ll find that OCCI is not only the one with the greatest maturity and quality, but also has the highest dissemination potential!

The report makes an analysis from the European and German point of view, and discusses the current field of standardisation in the Cloud arena. Stating that “the standardisation environment for cloud computing is only just starting to develop”, the report identifies OCCI (next to OVF, OpenStack, and CDMI) as “proving attractive”. It features a taxonomy of standards in cloud computing along challenges they address (“why?”) and the basis of their approach (“how?”), and identifies nine challenges, with data privacy the most prevalent, next to three fields (technology, management, and legal).

Well done to all and thanks to Alexander for the article and translations!

“Lá Fhéile Pádraig Shona Duit”

Photo Credit: cobalt@Flickr

“EGI is a federation of national and domain specific resource infrastructure providers comprised of individual resource centres. Many of these resource centres have been experimenting with the deployment of virtualised management environments to improve the local delivery of services. Many of EGI’s current and new user communities would like to access the flexibility provided by virtualisation across the infrastructure on demand in a ‘cloud like’ environment. Federating these individual virtualised resources is a major priority for EGI that has started with the EGI User Virtualisation Workshop, and the drafting of the EGI Cloud Integration Profile.”

OCCI plays an important part in providing interoperable interfaces (architectural overview) between the many sites that comprise the federated environment, currently approximately 1400 CPU cores!.

Below is a presentation that Matteo Turilli, the chair of the  Federated Clouds Task Force, gave at the Cloud Plugfest.

The doyouspeakOCCI Compliance Testing Facility is a Google App Engine (GAE)-based checking tool for the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) family of specifications. More specifically, it provides a full compliance test suite for the OCCI Core (GFD.183), OCCI Infrastructure (GFD.184), and OCCI RESTful HTTP Rendering (GFD.185)specifications.

doyouspeakOCCI is written in Python and heavily building on the GAE services, mainly Task Queue, URL Fetch, and the webapp Framework.

Note that doyouspeakOCCI is not to be considered the “official” testing suite for OCCI endorsed by the Open Grid Forum, but rather than that, a third-party contribution which aims to be as close as possible. For a more thorough explanation, please take a look at the wiki pages.

How to Use

doyouspeakOCCI was hard to implement, but is simple to use. Just point your browser tohttp://doyouspeakocci.appspot.com, enter the base URL of your OCCI implementation, and press “Go!”.

Optionally, you can provide credentials for HTTP basic auth, if your service is secured. We strongly recommend to use a one-time test account; although we promise to use the credentials only for the compliance test, we cannot guarantee what others on the way (especially GAE) will do with them. In the near future, doyouspeakOCCI will support OAuth to ameliorate this issue.

Please note that doyouspeakOCCI records data on every test run in the GAE DataStore. This is done solely for the sake of displaying usage statistics. Within the limitations of applicable jurisdiction and the GAE Terms of Service, we will not disclose this data to anyone beyond what is being displayed on the doyouspeakOCCI web presence.

For other questions, please also take a look at the FAQ.

Where to Get

doyouspeakOCCI is available as a source code release only, which can be obtained by two ways:

• By checking out the source code via git checkout
• By fetching a repository tarball or zipfile

Alternatively, you might want to pick one of the advertised downloads (click on the “Downloads” button in the upper right of the doyouspeakOCCI development home page at GitHub.

If you wish to run the service on your local system for testing purposes, please take a look at the doyouspeakOCCI Installation Guide for a detailed explanation on how to setup the environment.

Contributing

doyouspeakOCCI aims to be a community effort, and help is always welcome. Please contact us on the mailing list to learn more.

License

We think that doyouspeakOCCI should be available to everyone with the utmost amount of freedom. To make sure that contributions to doyouspeakOCCI itself remain perpetually free, the code has been developed under the GNU General Public License, Version 3. The documentation coming with doyouspeakocci is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License.

The blueprint (details on wiki) for this feature enhancement has been around a while now. And based on this blueprint a first implementation has been created.

Andy Edmonds presented the following slides during the Cloud Plugfest in Düsseldorf which highlight more details of the OCCI interface for OpenStack

As noted this work has partly been sponsored by dgsi and FI-WARE. Now on to interoperability testing and looking into getting other Standards like CDMI on top of OpenStack.