

The Sun Cloud will be RESTful - alexandros
http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/200x/2009/03/16/Sun-Cloud

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kogir
The really exciting news here is the bit at the end:

"I am 100% convinced that if there were a general-purpose platform for running
behind the firewall to automate scaling and deployment and take IT out of many
loops, there are a whole lot of enterprises who’d love that kind of elasticity
in their infrastructure.

Machine virtualization is a big deal, obviously. Lightweight lockin-free data-
center virtualization might be bigger, I think."

He's right! At Loopt there are many, many things we can't use conventional,
public, cloud offerings for because of privacy and/or security concerns. I
would jump immediately at the opportunity to install 3-5 racks of Sun hardware
and/or software, and get my own mini-cloud to expose to Loopt developers.

Right now the closest I can get is VMWare, but even it is still much to close
to the metal. Something like this could truly revolutionize how private data
centers are managed.

Imagine: * Need a QA environment for a while? Provision it. Drop it when done.
* Need to shift the allocation of processing resources between various
internal tasks and services as load and usage varies? Script it. Done.

I'm sure there are tons of use cases I'm missing. Those are just my top two.

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neilc
Using REST seems silly. Or rather, not necessarily silly, but not very
significant, either. Bray himself admits that using REST + JSON was basically
arbitrary:

 _Simply because we wanted a bits-on-the-wire interface. APIs, in the general
case, suck; and are really hard to make portable. Bits-on-the-wire are
ultimately flexible and interoperable. If you’re going to do bits-on-the-wire,
Why not use HTTP? And if you’re going to use HTTP, use it right. That’s all._

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extension
I hope their client doesn't resemble vmware's ungodly AJAX management
interface. Sysadmins want simple, scriptable command line tools, not web apps.

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delano
I'm still wrapping my head around this.

There's no official announcement online from Sun, other than a bits written
about CommunityOne. Most of the information has come from this post by Tim
Bray where he writes about his experience on the project. Everything I've read
is about the API, but where's the service? They're already 3 years behind
Amazon so there's no rush. Wait a few months and announce it all at once.

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jwilliams
Will this alienate all the people that Sun has sold WS/SOAP to?

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trezor
WS/SOAP is self-documenting and can have client-side code fully auto-generated
in a 100% reliable manner. REST, as it is not even near a documented standard
besides "use HTTP verbs" not so much.

With the right toolkit WS/SOAP is basically automated on the server _and_
client-side with no work involved.

Until REST gets there, enterprise applications and developers will still
prefer WS/SOAP en-masse simply due to tool support.

~~~
jwilliams
Yeah - I'd agree in general. However, I'd argue that SOAP isn't really there
yet either - it's more progressed, but issues such as versioning and lifecycle
management aren't something many orgs really have a handle on yet.

So I guess my query is - How will these orgs feel about Sun moving to REST
when they are still investing/maturing a SOA based on SOAP?

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axod
Can we just go back to calling it the 'net' or 'web' please? :(

~~~
alexandros
As far as I am aware automatically scalable infrastructure is not something
that was available until recently, nor is it subsumed by the 'net/web'
designation. There is more to it than the web. Have I missed something?

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axod
Automatically scalable infrastructure has been available, and in use, I'm sure
for quite a number of years. It's nothing new in terms of software.

AWS etc selling such a service, is newer, but it seems like cloud is just
being used now as a new "web 2.0" buzzword. "Upload your photos to the cloud!"
"Cloud based solutions" "Your music in the cloud" etc etc

~~~
alexandros
I understand your considerations, but the article has nothing to do with
software-as-a-service type 'clouds'. This is purely on the infrastructure-on-
demand and platform layers, and as such actually new, as you also agreed with.
Sorry if I am getting a bit technical but Clouds and REST happen to be very
close to my research subject. I am one happy bunny today seeing their
combination put forward by a major player.

Another thing to keep in mind that this is Tim Bray we are talking about. He
can hardly be considered a peddler of hype.

~~~
axod
Hey np. I probably shouldn't have commented on this particular one. I think it
was a combination of articles and this one just pushed me over the edge today.
The last few were far less worthy.

I agree there is good work going on. "infrastructure-on-demand" or "elastic-
infrastructure" sounds so much nicer (to me) than 'cloud' though.

