GoGrid Participating in the Deltacloud “One API for Many Clouds” Initiative

Written by Michael Sheehan on Aug 26th, 2010 | Filed under: API, Cloud Computing, Cloud News, General, GoGrid, Hosting, Industry, Open Source
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GoGrid has long been supporter of open standards and the open source movement. We recently promoted how many open source solution providers are leveraging GoGrid as a platform to disseminate their open source solutions and technology in the cloud. Long before that at the beginning of 2009, we made our public API available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike License. This meant that under this licensing, developers could “share, distribute, display and perform the work” as well as “make derivative works” based on our API.

Now we are taking it one step further because we realize in order for Cloud Computing to be adopted across the business IT landscape, there needs to be more standards put in place as well as a commonality across the board when it comes to Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). The Deltacloud initiative is grabbing this issue by the horns by working to combine interoperability with an open sourced API. And, they are the only major cloud framework that isn’t leveraging a single company’s proprietary code, API or intellectual property.

Deltacloud, an Apache Software Foundation incubator project that provides an open set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable computing interoperability across private and public clouds, recently announced support for GoGrid and we are pleased to participate in this important initiative. There are quite a few advantages of this effort, specifically:

The API can be offered by a cloud provider or individual user running their own server
Multiple client libraries can be written in a variety of computer languages (many are already available)
The core API logic resides on the API server, allowing consistent behavior across all client libraries
New cloud providers can be added to the API without needing to change the clients

The driver for GoGrid is currently under development but will support the following actions:

Create new instances
Stop running instances
Reboot running instances
Destroy instances
List all/get details about hardware profiles
List all/get details about realms
List all/get details about images
List all/get details about instances

Deltacloud is hosted at Apache incubator which allows it to benefit from the Apache governance model. This means that discussion, changes and updates are based on individual contributions.

For more information on the Deltacloud initiative, please visit the project hosted on the Apache incubator site.

About the author

Michael Sheehan is the Technology Evangelist for GoGrid & "Editor in Chief" as well. He handles digital media marketing, online audience development, PR, media relations, content creation and editing as well as a variety of other tasks. He is also an avid social media pundit and technology blogger.