OK thanks. I much appreciate your input. This article, writing from the perspective, not of private cloud but of public cloud offerings, seems to agree with your perspective. Not being a developer, I'd like to understand if any cloud infrastructure people that really understand development, or development people that really understand cloud infrastructure, are convinced that REST is best.
This article is written from the opposite perspective. The argument here is that by using a stateless architecture, there is a more robust design. Following this logic, if I am looking at AMPRS qualities (Availability, Manageability, performance, Recoverability and Security) then I would have a design benefit with REST. Michael KAvis makes a good point toward the argument that REST would enhance the availability of services in my cloud infrastructure if those services used stateless interactions and replaced ACID with BASE transacations. By his logic, for example, if I use VM provisioning with VCAC/vRA and my provisioning process needs to interact with many third party systems (CMDB, IPAM, etc.) to be successful, I would increase my AMPRS points with REST.
Chris I'm happy to hear your thoughts if I'm off track. Any other thoughts / opinions?
