Considering Cloud Storage? Make Sure you Get your REST

As an 'advanced' person in the industry - euphemism for old - I often find a power-nap useful. Just 10 or 15 minutes of rest, and I'm good to go for many more hours. Now, before you chastize me for being an old fogey, consider the usefulness of this simple exercise. It is a proven method, studied at length by many a scientist, known to be effective.

So it is with cloud storage - simpler is indeed better. At the recent SNW show, at which I spoke, the new Cloud Data Management Interface, or CDMI, was a very talked-about subject. The CDMI is based on a RESTful approach and method to storage. Using REST instead of a proprietary API, or heavyweight SOAP-oriented methods, is indeed much cleaner, much simpler and much more effective (time to develop, time to market, etc.). REST is stateless while WSDL/SOAP methods are stateful, which is another advantage for using REST.

One vendor at the show had a live, working implementation of storage management based on REST - which drew a lot of interest, including a cute iPhone-based application which used REST to interrogate remote (1000's of miles away) cloud storage elements and display live workloads, including I/O statistics and such. It was impressive. Which vendor, you say? I won't mention names here; do your homework on the subject, as you should.

I am convinced that the CDMI and RESTful techniques are the future of cloud storage, not proprietary APIs. When considering cloud storage, there are certainly many areas to investigate and study. It's a new field, so there is a lot of variation and new vendors (cloud storage providers) will no doubt emerge quickly out of the woodwork that is the traditional data center. So, it's going to be hard work to determine which provider, which SLA, which method to use.

Given that, make sure you get your REST - you'll need it.