OpenStack REST APIs are patterned after the Amazon EC2 APIs and are simple to interact with. There are typically two options for this interaction, depending on the language that the provisioning system is written in. Clients can either call the APIs directly using the language's HTTP or REST library or they can use one of the many cloud libraries that have sprung up in the past few years. These libraries can greatly simplify development by taking care of the authentication and serialization pieces of the work, but they can also limit the available API actions. Cloud libraries that we've seen commonly used these days include Apache jclouds for Java, OpenStack Shade for Python, and Fog for Ruby.
In this chapter, we'll interact ...
