Open Stack

On Fri, Oct 26, 2012 at 02:16:09PM +0200, Thierry Carrez wrote:
> Christopher B Ferris wrote:
> > Thanks for your thoughts. As for the EC2 v OpenStack APis, the EC2 API can be stripped out, leaving all functionality of nova
> > unimpaired. If the same could be true of the AWS Cloud Formation structures, it would make the project easier to consume 
> > for those with persnickety legal departments.
> 
> Indeed, Heat would basically be the first OpenStack project to adopt a
> third-party API as its main API (rather than introducing an
> OpenStack-specific API that lets us in control of the features we can
> expose).

This is incorrect - we implement an AWS compatible Cloudformation API, *and*
an openstack-specific ReST API, which *can* operate independently.

The intention is exactly as you suggest - the ReST API may expose a superset
of functionality compared to that available via the AWS compatible API, we
have control over it, it is not tied to a proprietary specification, hence
it can be used as a platform for innovation and new functionality.

Currently the AWS compatible API is a bit more mature/feature-complete than
the ReST implementaion, but we're working hard to fix that, and very soon we
should be in a position where you can strip out the AWS API and still access
all of the heat core functionality

The only AWS specific aspect of the heat implementation is currently the
template syntax, but again, this could be substituted with some other
format, e.g each orchestration API could potentially support different or
multiple template syntax - the amount of effort required to do this would be
non-trivial, but it definitely could/can be done.

Steve