Comments on: Cloud computing: would you like flexibility with your simplicity?

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » REST in practice for IT and Cloud management (part 1: Cloud APIs)

Thu, 16 Jul 2009 08:17:45 +0000

[...] have commented before on the Sun Cloud API (though the increasing richness of their model is starting to make my comments [...]

By: William Vambenepe’s blog » Blog Archive » A post-mortem on the previous IT management revolution

Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:13:38 +0000

[...] myself, it’s the model, stupid. Not the protocol. Something I (hopefully) explained in my comments on the Sun Cloud API (before I knew that caring about this API might actually become part of my day job) and something [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 07:42:32 +0000

The use of REST is not a fundamental characteristic of the API. In other words, if this API turns out to be useful I can rewrite it as a SOAP API and it would still be useful. Unless the SOAP API is made purposely complicated, it would only be marginally harder to use, not fundamentally less useful.

If you value serendipity in your interfaces, I would say there’s a fundamental usability difference between the two, though only from the vantage point of the broader system-of-systems context; i.e. do we keep piling up APIs in our registries, or do we have an interconnected set of data we can manipulate?

Wow, I haven’t made a REST argument in well over a year, it feels strange.

By: William Louth

William Louth — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:34:46 +0000

Thanks for the link. I like the labeling.

Frankly I am surprised that with such a wonderful abstract machine supported by many large vendors including Oracle, IBM, and Sun each with a cloud strategy unfolding that it does not dominate the space. It seems ideal for the task at hand especially as it has been proving in the enterprise space. If the cloud computing vendors want to get were the big bucks are (currently in the enterprise) and not just grab the limelight with the web 2.0 crowd then it would seem the right choice and foundation for an application engine or a pure cloud programming model/language/runtime.

By: William Vambenepe

William Vambenepe — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:37:16 +0000

to William Louth: I too like abstract machines better than fake machines in the long run (see http://stage.vambenepe.com/archives/135). But there is a need for both.

By: Tim Bray

Tim Bray — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 14:56:08 +0000

OK, I got around to fixing the damn GET in the example.

Readers might be interested in checking out Gall’s Law: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall's_law

By: William Louth

William Louth — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 11:00:14 +0000

Should customers still be creating hosts and processes in the cloud? I understand the need to grab money from existing legacy systems but this might in the end handicap the potential of the cloud itself in its purest form were such constructs are invalid at least in terms of what they represent today. Yes executing software needs some levels of containment (containers/grouping) but this could be more abstract and less physical (host, process). Sockets within the cloud could be just be identified logically with no need for the actual host or port number to be specified at least not in config files. This would reduce the amount of reconfiguration that is required to deploy copies of various application templates. Maybe eventually we might focus more on detecting changes in the runtime behavior of software execution/activity and less on config files which only hint at possible change in behavior.