CAMP 1.0 – An Open API for PaaS Application Management

Several companies including Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat and CloudBees have proposed an API for PaaS application management. The API allows developers to manage applications within and across various PaaS that will implement the specification without having any knowledge of the underlying cloud infrastructure.

CloudBees, Cloudsoft Corporation, Huawei, Oracle, Rackspace, Red Hat, and Software AG have announced a new PaaS management API called Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP). The API can be used by cloud service providers and users to create applications for managing resources in the cloud. The initiators start from the idea that cloud users should not deal with low-level resources such as virtual machines, storage or networking, but rather should be able to access high-level resources, such as applications and their components. Also, users should be able to access PaaS services from different vendors using a single management console, and they should be able to easily transfer resources between different clouds.

CAMP’s API is built on top of HTTP/1.1, includes a RESTful binding and uses JSON for transferring resources. CAMP functionality is to be provided as plugins to an Application Development Environment (ADE) or an Application Management System, allowing developers to create their application with ADE then upload, deploy and instantiate it within the cloud of their choice.

CAMP defines [PDF] a number of resources including cloud platform, platform components, application, and application components. A cloud platform is the entire PaaS seen as a resource accessed though CAMP, while a platform component may be various services offered. CAMP currently defines only one such service, namely a Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS).

One of the main resources is application, and CAMP offers interfaces for dealing with it throughout its entire life cycle depicted below:

An application is instantiated using a POST command, as in the following request-response sequence:

POST /paas/asm_template/1 HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org

HTTP/1.1 201 Created
Location: http://example.org/paas/assembly/1
Content-Type: ...
Content-Length: ...

while suspending an applications may be done as in the following example:

POST /<assembly-resource-url> HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org
Content-Type: application/vnd.org.example.PaaS +json;type=Xxxxx
Content-Length: ...
{"new_state": "suspend"}
HTTP/1.1 200 OK

CAMP has been submitted to OASIS for standardization, including a proposed charter (PDF) for the technical committee that is supposed to adopt it as a standard in 18 months. Oracle is the most involved company in the creation of CAMP with 7 out of 14 specification authors.