Making Cloud computing easier for agencies
NASA has Nebula. DISA has RACE. Both are cloud computing platforms that are showing how the Government can use this technology.
That's the starting point of an interesting report from Jason Miller on Federal News Radio.
The report notes that the Office of Management and Budget will require agencies to develop an alternative analysis discussing how they could use cloud computing for all major technology projects for the fiscal 2012 budget.
As part of this Senate lawmakers have recommended that $15 million should be used for:
improving innovation, efficiency and effectiveness in federal IT, including an initiative on optimizing common services and solutions/cloud computing. This initiative would provide for pilots to identify enterprisewide common solutions to eliminate duplication at the agency level and lower the total cost of federal IT infrastructure.
Of this $15 million, the Committee is including $7.5 million for the Center for IT Excellence proposed by GSA. The center will deploy a selected set of infrastructure services, cloud based applications, offer Infrastructure as a service to agencies, and provide portal government applications.
Several agencies are already using Cloud computing services and platforms, and expect to offer these as resources to other areas of government - in a similar vein to how Amazon offers cloud services to individuals and businesses.
NASA's NEBULA
Speaking about Nebula Chris Kemp, NASA Ames chief information officer, explained more about the Nebula Cloud Computing pilot under development at NASA's Ames Research center. He outlined how a new white paper will explain to agencies how 'to take the Nebula platform and implement it in their own hardware and play around with it'.
Nebula is to the Data center what Linux is to the personal computer...We're trying to have an integrated set of open technologies...that will allow you to have a full self-service cloud platform.
Kemp went on to explain how NASA is trying to make the NASA platform easily accessible to other agencies through GSA's app store. He says NASA will put the platform in the Apps.gov storefront in early 2010 so agencies can use a government credit card to provision space and resources on the platform.
However, he stressed that NASA is not seeking to become another Amazon or Rackspace for the government. Rather they want to create a platform suitable for NASA's needs, which could then be released back to the opensource community or commercial sector, to provide back to NASA.
Nasa is not in the business of providing IT. We're in the business of solving mission problems.
As a corollary to this, he explained how they will be releasing their entire business model to provide visibility and transparency into the structure of the platform and its related costs:
The government in order to adopt cloud computing quickly and take advantage of these opportunities needs to be a smart buyer and understand the technology. The biggest challenge at NASA is not the technology, it's the 50,000 people that need to know how to deploy, procure and implement processes and standards around the technology.
DISA's RACE
The report goes on to discuss the Defense Information Systems Agency's (DISA) cloud computing services. Henry Sienkiewicz, DISA's technical program director for the computer services division, recently announced that Department of Defence users would have the ability 'to self-service provision operating environments within the highly secured Defense Enterprise Computing Center’s (DECC) production environment'.
He explained how Rapid Access Computing Environment (RACE) now provides:
our users can now customize, purchase, and receive their test and development computing platform within 24 hours and the production environments within 72 hours, and that’s a must for worldwide missions with ever-changing computing requirements. Our goal is to allow software development to securely occur within the decision-making cycle.
The platform already has 3,000 users and hundreds of projects. It's working with other areas of the DoD with parts of the Army and Air Force to host Customer Relationship Management applications, and is discussing moving some of the Microsoft Office suite to the RISE platform.
Sienkiewicz says the goal for all of this is to virtualize at least 50 percent of its environment, and reduce the time it takes to take an application from an idea to production to about a week, instead of the current average of 40 days.
OMB's mandate
The Office of Management and Budget will require agencies in 2010 to participate in pilot projects using cloud computing. Federal News Radio reports that 'Agencies will be expected to tell OMB why they wouldn't use cloud computing for these initiatives [technology projects]'.
Then in 2013, 'agencies must give OMB a complete alternatives analysis for mixed life cycle projects where agencies are spending new money-known as development, modernization and enhancement-and steady state or operations and maintenance funding for how they could move to cloud computing'.
For this reason, NASA and the DISA are trying to help agencies move data and other applications onto their cloud based platforms. If they're to compete for government business with Amazon, Google or Microsoft they need to provide services provisioned easily with a credit card through a web portal.
It looks like NASA and DoD will be providing the cloud computing 'public option'. Whether they win business from agencies will depend on the quality and cost effectiveness of their services, rather than the fact that they're part of the government. It does, however, open up the intriguing prospect of a number of government entities competing for cloud computing business.
For more on GSA's Cloud Computing initiative see the presentation below, or Casey Coleman's session at the recent Gov 2.0 summit.
US Federal Cloud Computing Initiative Overview Presentation, (GSA)
For more on the Federal Gov's cloud activities, check the Fed Cloud blog, or for international government cloud initiatives see Cloudbook's directory.
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