REST APIs for cloud management and the Database.com launch

I found the top two stories on scalebig last night to be interesting enough for me to dig a little deeper. The one which surprised me the most was William Vambenepe’s post about why he thinks that REST APIs doesn’t matter in context of cloud management. While REST might be ideal for many different things, including web based applications which are accessed mostly by the browsers, Amazon chose to avoid REST for most of its infrastructure management APIs.

Has this lack of REStfulness stopped anyone from using it? Has it limited the scale of systems deployed on AWS? Does it limit the flexibility of the Cloud offering and somehow force people to consume more resources than they need? Has it made the Amazon Cloud less secure? Has it restricted the scope of platforms and languages from which the API can be invoked? Does it require more experienced engineers than competing solutions?

I don’t see any sign that the answer is “yes” to any of these questions. Considering the scale of the service, it would be a multi-million dollars blunder if indeed one of them had a positive answer.

Here’s a rule of thumb. If most invocations of your API come via libraries for object-oriented languages that more or less map each HTTP request to a method call, it probably doesn’t matter very much how RESTful your API is.

The Rackspace people are technically right when they point out the benefits of their API compared to Amazon’s. But it’s a rounding error compared to the innovation, pragmatism and frequency of iteration that distinguishes the services provided by Amazon. It’s the content that matters.

And the other big news was of course the launch of a new cloud datastore by salesforce at Database.com. Interestingly, you should notice, that they decided to brand it with its own website instead of making it part of its existing set of services. Its possible they did it to distance this new service from an impression that its only useful for applications which need other salesforce services. For more in-depth technical information continue reading here.

The infrastructure promises automatic tuning, upgrades, backups and replication to remote data centers, and automatic creation of sandboxes for development, test and training. Database.com offers enterprise search services, allowing developers to access a full-text search engine that respects enterprise security rules

In terms of pricing, Database.com access will be free for 3 users, and up to 100,000 records and 50,000 transactions per month. The platform will $10 per month for each set of 100,000 records beyond that and another $10 per month for each set of 150,000 transactions beyond that benchmark. The enterprise-level services will be an additional $10 per user per month and will include user identity, authentication and row-level security access controls.

Other references: Dreamforce 2010 – Database.com Launch Interview with Eric Stahl Read more