[gavanm]

I find the idea quite interesting - and it could be valuable just for the read-only aspect of it alone - especially if it is queryable through an ODBC or JDBC connection.

It helps avoid some scripting / token / API overhead - but I'm wondering what the trade off is in terms of initial setup time.

One general concern I have is around Data (state) consistency of the data after DML operations (insert / update). If the data represents the state of a resource - how do you know if there's a pending operation on it as a result of an earlier Update operation? How is idempotency handled? How are conflicting concurrent state changes handled (one user forces a restart, another initiates a shutdown)? What happens if a change applied to multiple records/resources only successfully applies on some of the resources?

This isn't specific to just this approach though - it's going to apply to any kind of cloud / resource management platform. I'm not sure how they tend to handle it - but a basic single record per resource has limitations around it that mean more work is needed. Maybe you end up with change history records?