You wake up in an unknown cloud region. You look around but there is no light, and no one there to tell you where you are. You rub your eyes, hoping something might come into focus, but nothing does. You need to know what resources are available to you right away so you know if you can survive in this region with everything you need. You know you need a managed MySQL database, and a KMS. You spot a phone on the wall that says "Instance Metadata Service". You pick it up and call, but the voice just tells you information about the room you are in, not anything outside of it. Suddenly, you see a BIGGER phone with the letters OCRMS on it. You run over there, pick it up, and suddenly it offers you everything you wanted to know.
"Hello, this is the OCRMS, and it appears you are in the East One region. Press 1 to know what managed services are available to you. Press 2 to know what storage options..."
You press one, and suddenly you have a list of all the managed services available using a standardized taxonomy that works in any cloud... You press 7 for "Managed MySQL"
"Press 1 for connection string information. Press 2 for pricing."
You press 1, and learn that not only do you need UID and credentials, but also an account ID. You do the same for KMS.
SUDDENLY YOU ARE SAFE!
You know how to connect to all the things, and that this particular region can provide you everything you need. And, in the process, you learned about some special "Canary" services that might not be available elsewhere.
OCRMS takes the mystery out of regions. It allows provisioners, PaaS, apps, and clusters to be multi-region without human knowledge of what might be different in a new region. It allows cloud providers to create dynamic dashboards of all features available in any region. OCRMS makes it easier to have region-level, or even cloud-level failover.
More SOON!