Subject: I-D Action: draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-01.txt

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 14 Mar 2016 07:40:18 -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-01.txt
	Pages           : 21
	Date            : 2016-03-14

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:
https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-01

A diff from the previous version is available at:
https://www.ietf.org/rfcdiff?url2=draft-li-sdnrg-design-restapi-01

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