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RightScale Is One Step Closer to a Unified Cloud API

Posted by Abel Avram on Aug 27, 2011

Sections: Operations & Infrastructure
Topics: Amazon ,; API ,; PaaS ,; IaaS ,; Companies ,; Rackspace ,; Cloud Computing ,; Eucalyptus ,; Programming

RightScale, a company providing unified access to multiple clouds, has announced a new release of their cloud management platform consisting of a new MultiCloud API, a new Add Server Assistant, and a Community Translations.

The most interesting feature is the new MultiCloud API. So far, RightScale’s API 1.0 has served the Amazon cloud, but the company wants to cover all clouds it manages through a unified API. The beta API version 1.5 is currently serving the non-AWS clouds they support -Cloud.com, Eucalyptus, and Rackspace-, but the company is currently preparing to use the same API for AWS deployments. When will be released, API 2.0 will cover all clouds supported and API 1.0 will be deprecated.

The API supports both XML and JSON formats, JSON being the default, and it is designed around the REST paradigm. This is how a List Servers command looks like:

GET https://my.rightscale.com/api/servers

And an example of launching a server:

POST https://my.rightscale.com/api/servers/11/launch

RightScale says that API 1.5 is pretty stable being used by some of their largest clients in production environments, but the API is still in beta and not recommended for production usage, but only for testing and development.

The new Add Server Assistant and Add Server Array Assistant replace the previous one-page dialog with a multi-tab wizard guiding the user through the necessary steps in creating and deploying a new server or array of servers on AWS, CloudStack, Eucalyptus or Rackspace.

The Community Translations is new feature integrated in the Dashboard allowing users to view, vote, and contribute to the translation process of the information displayed on the Dashboard. The idea is to have the whole dashboard translated by users instead of professional translators.

For the next week, RightScale plans to make available new server templates that work across multiple clouds.