There are many kinds of APIs which have been or might be defined for services in a cluster. Since our scope is necessarily limited, we are currently only considering working in the following general areas.

• Node services
• Group services
• Resource services
• Lock Services
• External Interfaces

Moreover, the areas we are going to concentrate on first are node liveness and membership, and resource agents. This will help us keep focused and enable us to make good progress while keeping the whole of the task in mind.

These areas are further defined below.

Examples of node services which are being considered for standard APIs include:

• Node liveness services
• Node membership services
• Node communication services (reliable, not globally ordered)

Examples of group services which are being considered for standard APIs include:

• Group Membership services
• Group communication services (reliable, ordered)
• Group Barriers
• Group Transactions
• Group Voting
• Group membership

Examples of resource services which are being considered for standard APIs include:

• Cluster (resource?) management
• Resource Agents
• Resource monitoring
• Resource fencing
• Remote instantiation (RIF)

Examples of lock services which are being considered for standard APIs include:

• Lock creation
• Lock manipulaiton
• Lock destruction

Examples of external interfaces which are being considered for standard APIs include:

• User Interface (GUI, CLI, etc.)
• Management (SNMP, CIM, etc) intefaces
• Logging interfaces

More information on some of these areas can be found in Greg Louis' notes from the Enschede clustering workshop.

The following documents are likely also of interest.

• Conceptual Model of Clusters in CVS.
• Cluster Event Notification API Model in CVS.
• Draft OCF charter document in PDF or StarOffice formats.
• An outline of the framework development project in HTML, PDF or StarOffice formats.
• Information on the 2001 Enschede clustering workshop.
• Information on the 2001 Ottawa clustering Working Group where the idea for the OCF was first formally presented.
• A talk on the OCF being prepared for the January 2002 Linux World Conference and Expo in New York City. Versions of this talk are available in HTML, PDF and StarOffice formats.
• Free Standards Group policy for forming new working groups.
• Draft answers to the FSG 102-1 questions in html or text.