Cloud Computing

Appendix Selected Topics

The purpose of this Appendix is to provide more information on selected topics that have been referenced earlier in the book:

• The first topic concerns the relevant operations and management standards developed in the IETF;
• The second topic is the development of modeling languages in general and the TOSCA standard in particular;
• The third topic is dedicated to the notion of the REST API in the context of the World-Wide Web architecture;
• The fourth topic covers the basic mechanisms that enable identity and access management.

A.1 The IETF Operations and Management Standards

The standards introduced here are the Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP), the Common Open Policy Service (COPS), and the Network Configuration (NETCONF) protocol, respectively.

A.1.1 SNMP

The OSI approach to network management in the Internet was neither ignored nor completely abandoned. It was, indeed, simplified and constrained to focus on smaller, specific problems. Until fairly recently, the main objective of network management was monitoring—not configuration management. As we will soon see, the SNMP protocol ended up being much less than universal; a new set of protocols was needed for configuration management. In addition, access management (and overall security of network management) was not systematically approached until SNMPv3.

The 1990 IETF RFC 1155¹ defines the Structure of Management Information (SMI). As in the OSI, the MIBs were defined using ASN.1, but the ...