A team in Engineering (partially funded by Venus-C) have released a tool, ovf4one, which provides an OCCI interface that accepts OVF and provisions resources through the OpenNebula OCA interface. It is implemented in Java and implements the OCCI specifications and uses OVF messages and OpenNebula as backend.

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.

We blogged previously about the availability of an OCCI implementation for OpenStack. Below is a screen cast that demonstrates some, not all, of the functionality available.

Demonstration of OCCI on OpenStack from dizz on Vimeo.

Hot on the heels of the OCCI OpenStack implementation (wiki, code review) a number of our community members (big thanks to Eugene from R2AD) will be organising an OpenStack Design Summit unconference OCCI session. All are welcome to it from the inquisitive to the sceptical!

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.

OCCI has been successfully mapped and implemented upon the Amazon EC2 API. The work has been carried out by TU Dortmund University in cooperation with the compute and research center GWDG. The implementation uses the rOCCI framework – more on that in a later post!

Screencast EC2 in rOCCI from Max Günther on Vimeo.

Today, we are happy and proud to find the German Federal Minstry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) fully endorses OCCI in its freshly published analysis on “The Standardisation Environment for Cloud Computing”.

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!

The OCCI working group and the OpenStack team are working together to deliver an OCCI implementation in OpenStack. The implementation blueprint can be found at the OpenStack nova blueprints site. The goal is to implement the OCCI specification next to the CDMI specification from SNIA.

For more information please visit: http://wiki.openstack.org/occi

For more information on R2AD‘s OCCI/CDMI client visit: http://www.r2ad.com/cloudclient.html

“SLA@SOI is delighted to have had the opportunity to contribute to OCCI right from the get-go. Our team is now busy completing development of an OCCI implementation (BSD License) on top of Apache Tashi, and we look forward with our continued support.”

“Within the UK-JISC funded project “Flexible Services for the Support of Research“, there will be  an open source implementation developed of OGF OCCI for Eucalyptus. This will be developed by the project and contributed to the community.”

“As open source, community-driven software, OpenNebula is fully committed to standards, ensuring that our users can avoid vendor lock-in. We provided the first reference implementation of the OCCI specification, and have many users and innovative projects that are building solutions around this implementation, so contributing to create an open ecosystem.” – Ignacio m. Llorente