Oracle Announces APIs For Cloud Interoperability

Oracle has announced an application programming interface (API) to manage private clouds and to address cloud interoperability.

As more companies shift applications to the cloud and private clouds become increasingly popular, interoperability becomes critical. Organisations need to ensure the clouds can talk to one another and that workloads can be easily moved among clouds. Currently, each cloud provider has its own set of rules but having all providers follow a single set of standards would encourage even more organisations to make the shift.

Based On Standard HTTP

“Enterprises are continuing to look to cloud computing to extend the value of their IT investments and better service users,” said Sushil Kumar, an Oracle vice-president.

The Oracle Cloud Resource Model API uses standard HTTP methods to interact with available resources to provision machines, modify configurations, and retiring unused resources, the company said. It also treats different resources such as storage volumes and virtual machines as logical entities, without forcing IT administrators to understand the details of the physical infrastructure, said Oracle.

A subset of the Cloud API, the Oracle Cloud Elemental Resource Model API, was submitted to the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF) to be considered in the proposed Infrastructure as a Service Cloud API standard, said Oracle.

The Resource Model API addresses the basic building blocks within a cloud – the machines, storage volumes, and networks – to encourage standardisation, said Oracle. The submitted specifications describe how to provision a machine from an image, to attach a volume onto a machine, and to connect the machine to the network, said Oracle.

The Cloud API ensures users can easily and efficiently manage cloud-based resources, said Oracle, allowing organisations to achieve “better business agility and flexibility”, high utilisation and reduced costs.

“With the Oracle Cloud API, Oracle is further enabling customers and partners to build and manage cloud environments – based on an open, application-aware IaaS [infrastructure as a service] platform – to improve service levels and the overall end-user experience,” said Sushil Kumar, an Oracle vice-president.

IT managers can use cloud management software based on these APIs to deploy virtual servers across clouds run on different hardware platforms, said Oracle.

The APIs were originally developed by Sun Microsystems and refined by Oracle after acquiring the company. The specifications are available on the Oracle Technology Network, the company said.

The announcement comes a week after Intel and 70 large global enterprises, such as BMW, Deutsche Bank and J P Morgan Chase, formed the Open Data Center Alliance to make clouds interoperable. The coalition members believe that as organisations continue to embrace cloud computing, the industry needs to standardise data centre components by defining hardware and software requirements. This will lead to more open and interoperable cloud and data centres, according to the group.

RedHat has also announced DeltaCloud which can be used to move cloud-based workloads among different providers. Red Hat has submitted DeltaCloud to the DMTF and to the Apache Foundation for consideration as an independent standard.

Rackspace teamed up with the United States government space agency NASA to launch OpenStack, a combination of Rackspace cloud architecture and NASA’s Nebula Cloud Platform.