Resource Types and Dashboard Mapping

Cross-Platform Concepts

Given CloudBridge’s goal to work uniformly across cloud providers, some compromises were necessary in order to bridge the many differences between providers’ resources and features. Notably, in order to create a robust and conceptually consistent cross-cloud library, resources were separated into labeled and unlabeled resources, and were given three main properties: ID, name, and label.

The ID corresponds to a unique identifier that can be reliably used to reference a resource. Users can safely use an ID knowing that it will always point to the same resource. All resources have an ID property, thus making it the recommended property for reliably identifying a resource.

The label property, conversely, is a modifiable value that does not need to be unique. Unlike the name property, it is not used to identify a particular resource, but rather label a resource for easier distinction. Only labeled resources have the label property, and these resources require a label parameter be set at creation time.

The name property corresponds to an unchangeable and unique designation for a particular resource. This property is meant to be, in some ways, a more human-readable identifier. Thus, when no conceptually comparable property exists for a given resource in a particular provider, the ID is returned instead, as is the case for all OpenStack and some AWS resources. Given the discrepancy between providers, using the name property is not advisable for cross-cloud usage of the library. Labeled resources will use the label given at creation as a prefix to the set name, when this property is separable from the ID as is the case in Azure and some AWS resources. Finally, unlabeled resources will always support a name, and some unlabeled resources will require a name parameter at creation. Below is a list of all resources classified by whether they support a label property.

Labeled Resources Unlabeled Resources
Instance Key Pair
MachineImage Bucket
Network Bucket Object
Subnet FloatingIP
Router Internet Gateway
Volume VMFirewall Rule
Snapshot  
VMFirewall  

Properties per Resource per Provider

For each provider, we documented the mapping of CloudBridge resources and properties to provider objects, as well as some useful dashboard navigation. These sections will thus present summary tables delineating the different types of CloudBridge resources, as well as present some design decisions made to preserve consistency across providers: