Oracle released a private cloud managment API called the Oracle Cloud API to the Oracle Technology Network. today. The specification is available here (PDF). The company also submitted the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, a subset of the Oracle Cloud API, to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) for consideration as the task force’s IaaS API standard. The DMTF submission is not being released to the public at this time. Oracle is latest vendor to try its hand at creating a cloud computing standard.
Oracle software architect William Vambenepe explains some of the differences between the OTN and DMTF versions of the APIs on his blog. The version submitted to the DMTF is designed to standardize only the core of IaaS, the parts that are similar across all implementations. “It’s the part that’s ripe for a simple standard, hopefully free of much of the drama of a more open-ended and speculative effort,” writes Vambenepe.
According to Vambenepe, the OTN version and the DMTF version are essentially the same, but the DMTF version does not include sections 9.2, 9.4, 9.6, 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10. Oracle doesn’t think these sections are ready for industry wide standardization yet, but the company wants to publish them and expose them to feedback now.
In August, Red Hat submitted Deltacloud to the DMTF. Before that, Rackspace released its OpenStack initiative, which includes Microsoft as a member. OpenStack was followed by a cloud platform from Eucalyptus Systems, newScale, MomentumSI, and rPath.
The DMTF is an enterprise IT standards organization founded in 1992. Its member companies include Red Hat, Oracle, Rackspace, VMware and many other companies. A complete list of member companies is here. DMTF’s Open Cloud Standards Incubator was founded in 2009 to address the need for open standards in cloud management. The incubator leadership includes AMD, Cisco, Citrix, EMC, HP, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Novell, Red Hat, Savvis, Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), and VMware.
