Survey of Public IaaS Cloud Computing API

Abstract

Recently, Cloud computing is spread rapidly and many Cloud providers start their Cloud services. One of the Cloud computing problems is Cloud provider Lock In” for users. Actually, Cloud computing management APIs such as ordering or provisioning are different in each Cloud provider, so that users need to study and implement new APIs when they change Cloud providers. OGF and DMTF start the discussions of standardization of Cloud computing APIs, but there is no standard now. In this technical note, to clarify what APIs cloud providers should provide, we study common APIs for Cloud computing. We survey and compare Cloud computing APIs such as Rackspace Cloud Server, Sun Cloud, GoGrid, ElasticHosts, Amazon EC2 and FlexiScale which are currently provided as public IaaS Cloud APIs in the market. From the survey, the common APIs should support REST access style and provide account management, virtual server management, storage management, network management and resource usage management capabilities. We also show an example of OSS to provide these common APIs compared to normal hosting services OSS.