Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface
| Status | Published |
|---|---|
| Year started | 2010 |
| Latest version | 1.1 October 2013 |
| Organization | Distributed Management Task Force |
| Related standards | Open Virtualisation Format (OVF) |
| Domain | Cloud computing |
| Abbreviation | CIMI |
| Website | www |
Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) is an open standard API specification for managing cloud infrastructure.
CIMI's goal is to enable users to manage cloud infrastructure in a simple way by standardizing interactions between cloud environments to achieve interoperable cloud infrastructure management between service providers and their consumers and developers.
CIMI 1.1 was registered as an International Standard in August 2014 by the Joint Technical Committee 1 (JTC 1) of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC).
The CIMI standard is defined and published by the Distributed Management Task Force (DMTF). It includes the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Model and RESTful HTTP-based Protocol specification, the CIMI XML Schema, the CIMI Primer and the CIMI Uses Cases whitepaper:
CIMI aims to provide a single set of interfaces that a cloud consumer can use to provision and manage their cloud infrastructure in multiple clouds, so client code does not need to be adapted to each of the proprietary interfaces from these multiple vendors. CIMI has been described as a de jure standard that is under change control of a standards body, contrasting it to a de facto standard where typically one vendor has change control over the interface, and everyone else has to reverse engineer the inner workings of it. It is expecting vendors to embrace a dual strategy of delivering two offerings – one a CIMI compliant offering and the second a more proprietary offering that allows for more proprietary functionality.
CIMI is scoped to the core IaaS functionality such as deploying and managing Machines, Volumes, Networks, Monitoring, and Systems that group them. It includes a feature discovery mechanism to find out what functions the cloud provider supports, including the metadata describing capabilities and resource constraints.
The CIMI model describes in detail all the resources that are accessible by the Cloud Consumer and that are maintained by the Cloud Provider, and their relationships.
The main entry point for the CIMI Consumer is the IaaS Provider's Cloud Entry Point. All other data is discovered, iteratively:
The model is self-describing and allows for querying its own metadata, e.g., to discover which extensions have been implemented. The model is also extensible by the Consumer and the Provider.
The model also defines serializations both in XML and JSON for each resource.
CIMI addresses the management of the lifecycle of infrastructure provided by an IaaS Provider, such as the creation, deletion, viewing and alteration of virtual machines, networks and storage, and start and stop operations. It also defines resource operations such as creating machine images or snapshots of machines for backup & restore, or for creation of additional identical virtual machines.
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