What does the new cloud platform API mean?

BANGALORE, INDIA: A Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) specification, developed by a consortium of seven technology vendors, including Oracle, Red Hat and Huawei, is now under the consideration of the OASIS standards organization.

Let us look what CAMP, targeted at application developers and deployers for self service management of application on PaaS, is and what it can offer.

"It is closely aligned with the application development process where applications are typically developed in an Application Development Environment (ADE) and then deployed into a private or public platform cloud," writes Oracle principal cloud strategist Mark Carlson in a blog post.

It standardizes the model behind an application’s dependencies on platform components and provides a standardized format for moving applications between the ADE and the cloud, and if and when desirable, between clouds, he adds.

"Once an application is deployed, CAMP provides users with a standardized self service interface to the PaaS offering, allowing the cloud consumer to manage the lifecycle of the application on that platform and the use of the underlying platform services. The CAMP interface includes a RESTful binding of the CAMP model onto the standard HTTP protocol, using JSON as the encoding for the model resources" he adds.

The model for CAMP includes resources that represent the application, its components and any platform components that they depend on. It is important PaaS Cloud consumers understand that for a PaaS cloud, these are the abstractions that the user would prefer to work with, not Virtual Machines and the various resources such as compute power, storage and networking.

"One major challenge addressed by the CAMP specification is that of ensuring that application deployment on a new platform is as seamless and error free as possible. This becomes even more difficult when the application may have been developed for a different platform and is now moving to a new one. In CAMP this is accomplished by matching the requirements of the application and its components to the specific capabilities of the underlying platform."

This needs to be done regardless of whether there are existing pools of virtualized platform resources (such as a database pool) which are provisioned(on the basis of a schema for example), or whether the platform component is really just a set of virtual machines drawn from an infrastructure pool, the blog adds.

"The interoperability between platform clouds that CAMP offers means that a CAMP client such as an ADE can target multiple clouds with a single common interface. Applications can even be spread across multiple platform clouds and then managed without needing to create a specialized adapter to manage the components running in each cloud," he adds.