Standards in the Cloud: Open Cloud Computing Interface and DMTF

Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI)

The Open Grid Forum created the Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI). They claim to have one of the first standards in the cloud. OCCI was initially built to deliver portability and interoperability for IaaS platforms. In its initial implementation, it was used for different tasks around deployment, scaling and monitoring for virtual machines in the cloud. The library also supports common tasks for other cloud layers such as SaaS and PaaS [Ope14a].
OCCI is not a specific library that enables interoperability and portability. Hence, it is a definition of standards that can be implemented by individual platforms. The standard exists of 3 elements: the core description, the infrastructure description for the IaaS domain and a rendering description. The rendering is used to provide a REST HTTP service [Ope14b].
OCCI is implemented by a large number of cloud platforms. Major platforms such as Apache Cloudstack, OpenStack, OpenNebula and Eucalyptus implement that standard. However, large public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services, IBM, Microsoft and Google don’t implement that standard [Ope14c].
The OCCI standard focuses on IaaS. At present, it supports compute, networking, storage, and infrastructure templates. Storage does not define blob storage, as it is about the storage of virtual machines [Met11].

Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) initiatives

Distributed Management Task Force proposed several standards for cloud computing [Dmt09]. The key focus of the DMTF is to improve standards around IaaS solutions. As a key standard, the DMTF developed the Open Virtualization Format (OVF). However, there are no standards for APIs and platform services available.
This post is part of a work done on Cloud interoperability. You can access the full work here and the list of references here.