Redfish

Redfish is the standard the rest of the hardware industry does not have. Published by the Distributed Management Task Force, it defines a RESTful, JSON, schema-backed interface for managing physical infrastructure — servers, storage, networking, chassis, power and thermals — as addressable resources rather than as an out-of-band protocol from the 1990s.

• Resources, not registers - Systems, Chassis, Managers, Power, Thermal and Storage are named resources with a published schema, which is what makes the surface legible to tooling and to agents.
• Schema-backed - Every resource is described in a machine-readable schema set the DMTF versions and publishes, alongside an OpenAPI rendering.
• Built to replace IPMI - The predecessor was a binary out-of-band protocol; Redfish is HTTPS and JSON, which is why it can be part of ordinary automation.
• Out-of-band by design - It manages hardware that may not have a working operating system, which is precisely the case where a human has to be in a data center otherwise.
• Extended by vendors - Dell’s iDRAC, HPE iLO, Supermicro and others layer their own OEM extensions over the common core.

The State of Compute & Hardware APIs found the effect Redfish has on a score. In a devices and electronics layer of 503 records averaging 11.9, the two highest are Dell Servers at 60.5 and Supermicro at 53.6, and both build their published surface on Redfish. The standard did the thing the silicon layer below it still lacks: it named the nouns, so every implementer publishes the same ones. Its reach stops at the chassis, and the layer beneath — components, parts, lifecycle, errata — has no equivalent and scores like it.