Subject: I-D Action: draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-00.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 30 Mar 2015 14:33:21 -0700

A New Internet-Draft is available from the on-line Internet-Drafts directories.

        Title           : Requirements and Design Patterns for REST Northbound API in SDN
        Authors         : Li Li
                          Wei Zhou
                          Min Luo
                          Wu Chou
	Filename        : draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-00.txt
	Pages           : 21
	Date            : 2015-03-30

Abstract:
   As stated in ONF SDN Architecture WG Charter [Arc2013], in the SDN
   architecture, the control and data planes are decoupled, network
   intelligence and state are logically centralized, and the underlying
   network infrastructure is abstracted from the applications. As a
   result, network operators gain programmability, automation, and
   network control, enabling them to build highly scalable, flexible
   networks that readily adapt to changing business needs. In this
   architecture, the Northbound API provides interfaces to the external
   components where applicable.

   As REST architectural style has gained more popularity in
   implementing loosely-coupled systems, RESTful services are becoming
   the style of choice for SDN Northbound API and gaining increasingly
   importance in SDN architecture, for example, the Floodlight
   [Floodlight] has a Northbound API based on REST.

   However, despite the recent advances made on RESTful web services,
   there is a lack of guidelines for designing RESTful networking
   protocols and communication web services, especially based on the
   Resource-Oriented Architecture (ROA) that further refines the REST
   principles. Many networking protocols that claim to be REST APIs are
   not hypertext driven as prescribed by REST. This situation can lead
   to REST networking APIs that are not as scalable, extensible,
   maintainable, and interoperable as promised by REST.

   This document describes the key rules and design patterns for the
   SDN Northbound API in a truly RESTful manner, based on our
   experiences with REST API designs in general and SDN Northbound API
   design in particular. The rules and the design patterns illustrate
   the solutions to the common API problems in REST API designs, using
   the network virtualization API of OpenStack as an example.

The IETF datatracker status page for this draft is:
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi/

There's also a htmlized version available at:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-00

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