Company presents customers with a new discipline with added security, visibility, integration and scale requirements.

Memset, a cloud provider, recently announced that it has rolled out its own API for customers to be able to manage their entire cloud portfolio. Its API enables customers to perform many of the same operations they can currently perform with their web based control panel, but from their own applications, presenting customers with a new discipline with added security, visibility, integration and scale requirements.

According to the company, the API works for a range of its products including Miniserver VM provisioning, DNS management, Performance Patrol cluster management, bandwidth management and, in the case of Memstore, its cloud storage product, augments the existing OpenStack API. This development extends API functionality well beyond the usual limited basic provisioning capabilities, and the company has more in the pipeline including automated provisioning of whole dedicated servers.

It mentions that the company has built the API using standard protocols making it as easy and simple to use as possible. It provides two different access methods over HTTPS: a RESTful interface (using JSON) and an XML-RPC interface. In addition, an open source command line shell is also provided, making it very easy to explore the API and execute remote commands with no programming involved. With OpenStack continuing to gain steam, there are plans to add a compatibility layer in the future. The company has proved the benefits of a vendor-agnostic API and the company firmly believes that the OpenStack Cloud Compute API will prevail as the standard. Further information and documentation can be found at http://www.memset.com/apidocs/.

"Providing a consistent, well designed and fully documented API is very important if we want to evolve our cloud computing services into a cloud computing platform where our customers can build and scale their products with complete confidence," said Juan J. Martinez, Lead OpenStack Developer at Memset. "The API is important because it changes the way our infrastructure is used: we provide all our existing services as building blocks that can be combined programatically in ways that we haven't thought about but may be very important to our customers," said Martinez.