Design Goals

  1. Create a cloud abstraction layer which minimises or eliminates the need for cloud specific special casing (i.e., Not require clients to write if EC2 do x else if OPENSTACK do y.)

  2. Have a suite of conformance tests which are comprehensive enough that goal 1 can be achieved. This would also mean that clients need not manually test against each provider to make sure their application is compatible.

  3. Opt for a minimum set of features that a cloud provider will support, instead of a lowest common denominator approach. This means that reasonably mature clouds like Amazon and OpenStack are used as the benchmark against which functionality & features are determined. Therefore, there is a definite expectation that the cloud infrastructure will support a compute service with support for images and snapshots and various machine sizes. The cloud infrastructure will very likely support block storage, although this is currently optional. It may optionally support object storage.

  4. Make the CloudBridge layer as thin as possible without compromising goal 1. By wrapping the cloud provider’s native SDK and doing the minimal work necessary to adapt the interface, we can achieve greater development speed and reliability since the native provider SDK is most likely to have both properties.