March 22nd, 2010 • Comments Off on Leaving Sun – Kick butt and have fun!
I decided to leave Sun Microsystems/Oracle and move on to a new position which start 1st of May. I was looking around for a while and reached out to some people and decided that moving on is the best bet for me.
Don’t get me wrong: Working for Sun has been great! I met very bright, great, important, impressive and most of all innovative people – and the company supported me in creating things like OCCI. It was a great experience! Most certainly I’m a bit saddish about this. Sun was a dream-come-true when I started and I’m extremely happy that I had the chance to be part of this history.
Now I move on for various reasons which I might explain to you while having a beer…I will continue to work on Grids and Clouds and hopefully I can push OCCI even more! I will keep on blogging on my blog. My blog at blogs.sun.com/intheclouds will probably vanish sometime (*sniff*) but you can find me using the known website: tmetsch.org. But for now: Kick Butt and Have Fun!
March 19th, 2010 • Comments Off on Why Standards? – another point of view
During the past days there where several events where the topic ‘Why Standards’ was discussed. A writeup/summary of one of this events can be found here. Now read the following quote (out of context – I know :-)):
The people on standards bodies are in danger of speaking in an echo chamber. After a while, all they can hear is themselves
I do not agree with this. I will not comment on the ‘why standards’ and ‘we need standards for interoperability’ topics. But I want to raise one point: Why not see Standards bodies as Thinktanks? I mean so many people come together and bring in so many different opinions and points of views – which is very good so the solution (I do not call it standard now) will be cool (technology). I talked to so many people in the past days and all agreed that e.g. OCCI has some cool ideas. And we reached that by inviting all kinds of people with alls kinds of backgrounds to help create this cool thing. Okay we had our fights but somehow we reached consensus and I bet that a research lab of a company would have never come to the point where we are – just because they do not have all those different views.
Important is that you talk openly – if you have strict IPRs as a Standard Body and you’re not allowed to tell other people – you might indeed end up in ‘talking to yourself’.
February 24th, 2010 • Comments Off on Status Update on OCCI
One year ago Ignacio Llorente and me started asking around and organizing a BoF session for OGF25 in Catania, Italy. We finally started working on one of the first Cloud Standards in March. All this was driven by the project RESERVOIR, Now it has become definitely a little bit bigger 🙂
Here are some facts and some interesting information about OCCI to show you the current status
We have been renamed from CAPI (Cloud API) to OCCI
Next to me Andy Edmonds, Sam Johnston and Alexis Richardson are chairing this group and have all done a great job
Our initial focus was IaaS but we might move to PaaS in future
We had 100 people attending our first session at OGF25; Until now around 230 people are on the mailing list
It doesn’t mater which programming language you are using Java, Python, or something else. Writing cool kick-ass Unit-tests is a must. So here are some thoughts and Ideas:
Design first & design to test. But do not add extra methods just for testing!
Always write your unit-test first; It will start small (just checking the public methods) and eventually grow with your code.
Design and spend time writing test environments with mocks etc.
Each method should be at least tested by 3 test methods in your unit-test:
test for success – Test if the method behaves correctly when given parameters in range; this is were the Test-Driven-Development starts.
test for failure – Test if the method behaves correctly when given invalid parameters, wrong environment etc.
test for sanity – Test with a set of input parameters and compare results with expected output parameters.
Next to this I would encourage all developers to use Agile development methodologies like Scrum or similar. And also: please tweet and blog to give your users an insight of what is going on with your product/software.