Looking for our published document series? Click on the Documents link to see the complete list of the published OGF formal documents and standards.

OGF is committed to the creation of well-thought-out standards, APIs and design patterns to maximize the productivity of users, suppliers, service providers and programmers in modern advanced distributed computing settings. As described in our Mission Statement, OGF “accomplishes its work through open forums that build the community, explore trends, share best practices and consolidate these best practices into standards.”

Standards benefit users by eliminating or greatly reducing vendor lock-in, encouraging interoperability and permitting the selection and use of best-of-breed implementations of software components. Suppliers and providers of cloud and grid technology benefit by the increased assurance that such components will work together designed when deployed – which is especially important in high-usage and automated infrastructures. Software developers also benefit by making use of standard interfaces with well-understood and properly designed behaviors, allowing them to pursue innovation in software internals without having to redesign and re-implement common components for connectivity to other software.

In the modern software development world, standards cannot be designed in isolation from feedback from real user, provider and developer usage patterns. The OGF processes for document and standards production have been refined to allow close, active communication among all of these contributors with processes that allow for due deliberation but that still provide options for rapid turn-around when needed and timely feedback from the community. We are proud that OGF standards support infrastructures that are used to deliver billions of core-hours of computation annually, move and manage hundreds of petabytes of data routinely, and to control and configure some of the fastest research networks in the world on a daily production basis.

A selection of the most popular standards frameworks resulting from this OGF community activity is highlighted below.

• The (Open Cloud Computing Interface OCCI) specification set defines a general protocol and API applicable to many different cloud resource management tasks. OCCI began as a remote management API for IaaS model based Services, allowing for the development of interoperable tools for common tasks including deployment, autonomic scaling and monitoring. It has since evolved into a general-purpose flexible RESTful API framework with a strong focus on integration, portability, interoperability and innovation while still remaining highly extensible. OCCI is suitable to serve many other models in addition to IaaS, including e.g. PaaS and SaaS. The current release (v1.1) of OCCI has achieved a high degree of adoption and implementation in production in a wide variety of languages, projects, software products and application areas.

• The (Data Format Description Language (DFDL)) is a language for describing text and binary data formats. A DFDL description allows any text or binary data to be read from its native format and to be presented as an instance of an information set. DFDL also allows data to be taken from an instance of an information set and written out to its native format. DFDL achieves this by leveraging W3C XML Schema Definition Language (XSDL) 1.0. It is therefore very easy to use DFDL to convert text and binary data to a corresponding XML document.

• The WS-Agreement and WS-Agreement Negotiation family of specifications provide a language and a protocol for creation, management and monitoring of automated machine-readable service agreements in real time. This specification set includes provisions for advertising the capabilities of service providers and creating agreements based on templates, and for monitoring agreement compliance at runtime. Many implementations and a framework exist for the use of these standards.

• The (Distributed Resource Management Application API (DRMAA)), currently at version 2 and with an accompanying C language binding, is a set of API specifications for tightly coupled and portable programmatic access to cluster, grid, and cloud systems that has seen widespread adoption in batch scheduling and other implementations.

• Standards that underly large-scale grid and related distributed computing systems include the High Performance Computing Basic Profile (HPC-BP), the Basic Execution Service (BES), as used for example in the XSEDE project and European Middleware Initiative Execution Service as well as many other international production distributed computing services, along with the Grid Laboratory Uniform Environment (GLUE), the Resource Naming Service (RNS) Specification and RNS WSRF Basic Profile Rendering, OGSA ByteIO, and many others.

• The Network Markup Language (NML), Network Service Framework, Network Service Interface (NSI) Connection Service and other products of our networking-oriented infrastructure groups enjoy widespread adoption and underly some of the most advanced performance testing, monitoring and management frameworks in the industry.

• Extensive work on authentication and authorization in distributed environments, including the Grid Certificate Profile and related documents produced by the Certificate Authority Operations (CAOPS) working group and related products by the Federated Security community group, used for example by the Interoperable Global Trust Federation (IGTF) and supporting projects world-wide in cloud and grid computing.

This short summary is only sufficient to hit some of the highlights. For further information, please explore our OGF Published Documents and our OGF Areas and Groups, look through our Upcoming OGF Events, or learn about Membership in the Open Grid Forum so that you can contribute actively as an OGF member.