The SNIA has published a Work-in-Progress draft version of the Cloud Data Management Interface (CDMI) for public review and feedback. This functional specification is being proposed to act as the interface that applications will use to create, retrieve, update, and delete elements from the Cloud.

The Cloud Storage Technical Working Group, which approved the CDMI for public review and comment, expects that most existing cloud storage offerings will be able to implement the interface. This can be done with an adapter to an existing proprietary interface or directly, side by side with existing interfaces. In addition, existing client libraries, such as XAMO, can be adapted to CDMI and an example of this is shown in the published draft (see Figure 5).

Reportedly, the CDMI will allow a client to access the cloud storage offering and manage containers as well as the data in them. Another capability will be for data system metadata to be set on containers along with their contained data elements. The CDMI can also be used by administrative and management applications to manage accounts, security access and monitoring/billing information, even for storage that is functionally accessible by legacy or proprietary protocols, the SNIA draft explains.

The capabilities of the underlying storage and data services are exposed. SNIA notes that conformant cloud offerings may offer a subset of the CDMI interface as long as they expose the limitations in the capabilities part of the interface.

The CDMI specification uses RESTful principles in the interface design where possible. If not, it is explicitly noted.

Interested reviewers should keep in mind this is a work-in-progress version and subject to change. It is not endorsed by the SNIA for commercial shipping product implementation, but rather for review, feedback, and prototyping work to ensure it will meet the needs of the industry.

More Information

SNIA Cloud Data Management Interface Version 0.80 Working Draft

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