CLOUD Cloud Management Initiative

DMTF Cloud Management Standards

Working to Address Management Interoperability for Cloud Systems

(Having finished its work, the Cloud Management Initiative is currently quiesced. If you are interested in expanding Cloud Management Initiative and contribute to the creation of additional DMTF Cloud Management standards, please contact us.)

Technologies like cloud computing and virtualization have been embraced by enterprise IT managers seeking to better deliver services to their customers, lower IT costs and improve operational efficiencies.

DMTF has multiple standards and working groups addressing cloud management, and the Cloud Management Initiative brings this work together for an integrated approach. Focused on achieving interoperable cloud infrastructure management between cloud service providers and their consumers and developers, the Cloud Management Initiative also promotes adoption of these standards by the industry.

The Cloud Management Initiative produced standards and whitepapers in the following areas:

  • Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) - describes the model and protocol for management interactions between a cloud Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) provider and the consumers of an IaaS service. The basic resources of IaaS (machines, storage, and networks) are modeled to provide consumer management access to an implementation of IaaS and facilitate portability between cloud implementations that support the specification.
  • Open Virtualization Format (OVF) – a portable metadata format for the distribution of virtual systems onto and between virtualization platforms. OVF provides the industry with a standard packaging format for software solutions based on virtual systems. OVF has been adopted and published by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as ISO 17203.
  • Cloud Audit Data Federation (CADF) Data Format and Interface Definitions - a standard which specifies audit events which span cloud and service providers, and make these audit events comprehensible, consistent, shareable, and merge-able. The standard specifies an event model with data needed to certify, self-manage and self-audit application security in cloud environments.
  • Software Identification and Entitlement Usage Metrics Whitepaper– a document which describes information useful in identifying licensed software products, and to trace and gather the use of the software and other entitlement usage metrics across the span of deployments. A SoftwareID CIM profile was also created which utilized these concepts.

Alliance Partners

The initiative worked in collaboration with a number of industry organizations to develop solid partnerships that help unify management initiatives. These organizations are shown in the Alliance Partner website.

Get Involved

DMTF welcomes feedback on our standards, but requires that individuals submitting comments first agree to our DMTF Feedback Policy.

DMTF Specifications

DSP # Version Title Date Comments Versions
DSP0264 1.0.0 CIMI-CIM Specification 14 Dec 2012 Standard View
DSP0263 2.0.0 Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Model and RESTful HTTP-based Protocol 17 Jul 2016 Standard View
DSP0262 1.0.0 Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) - Data Format and Interface Definitions Specification 19 Jun 2014 Standard View
DSP0243 2.1.1 Open Virtualization Format Specification 27 Aug 2015 Standard View

White Papers and Technical Notes

DSP # Version Title Date Comments Versions
DSP2042 1.0.0 Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Use Cases 26 Feb 2015 Informational View
DSP2038 1.0.0 Cloud Audit Data Federation - OpenStack Profile (CADF-OpenStack) 16 Sep 2014 Informational View
DSP2027 2.0.0 Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Primer 4 Aug 2016 Informational View
DSP2017 2.0.0 Open Virtualization Format White Paper 24 Apr 2014 Informational View
DSP-IS0103 1.0.0 Use Cases and Interactions for Managing Clouds 18 Jun 2010 Informational View
DSP-IS0102 1.0.0 Architecture for Managing Clouds 18 Jun 2010 Informational View
DSP-IS0101 1.0.0 Interoperable Clouds 11 Nov 2009 Informational View

Schemas

DSP # Version Title Date Comments Versions
DSP8049 1.0.1 Network Port Profile XML Schema 3 Jan 2013 Standard View
DSP8023 2.0.1 OVF Envelope XSD 25 Aug 2013 Standard View
DSP8009 1.0.2 CIMI XML Schema 24 Feb 2014 Standard View

Historical Documents

DSP # Version Title Date Comments
DSP8009 1.1.0a CIMI XML Schema 17 Feb 2014 Historical
DSP2041 1.0.0a Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface (CIMI) Extensions 2 Mar 2015 Historical
DSP2028 1.0.0a Cloud Auditing Data Federation (CADF) Use Case White Paper 27 Jun 2012 Historical

Open Source Projects using DMTF CLOUD Technologies

DMTF technologies are leveraged in numerous third-party open source projects. If you are aware of any additional projects using DMTF technologies that are not included below, please contact us so we can add them to the list.
Title Description of Tool CLOUD Standard
OpenStack Ceilometer

The Ceilometer project is a data collection service that provides the ability to normalize and transform data across all current OpenStack core components with work underway to support future OpenStack components.

CADF
OpenStack Keystone

Keystone provides notifications about usage data so that 3rd party applications can use the data for billing, monitoring, or quota purposes. This document describes the current inclusions and exclusions for Keystone notifications.

CADF
OpenStack Monasca

Monasca is a open-source multi-tenant, highly scalable, performant, fault-tolerant monitoring-as-a-service solution that integrates with OpenStack. It uses a REST API for high-speed metrics processing and querying and has a streaming alarm engine and notification engine.

CADF
Sirocco CIMI API Server

This Web module implements all the REST machinery of the DMTF CIMI API and interacts with the business tier of Sirocco through an internal EJB business api.

CIMI
Common OVF Tool

COT (the Common OVF Tool) is a tool for editing Open Virtualization Format (.ovf,.ova) virtual appliances

OVF