NASA Moving on from OpenStack, Embraces Commercial Cloud
Nebula, NASA, and OpenStack, Open NASA
“Recently, on May 15, NASA announced a new cloud computing strategy for the Agency at the Uptime Institute’s symposium in Santa Clara, CA. Among its facets is a reduction to our OpenStack development efforts in favor of becoming a “smart consumer” of commercial cloud services.”
IT Reform at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA CIO Blog
“Improved investment management practices, the use of cloud services when appropriate, and the use of shared services as a provider and consumer are core tenets in our IRM Strategic Plan released in June 2011. To underscore the importance of this shift, I identified a Deputy CIO for IT Reform, Gary Cox, in 2012 to provide an integrated focus on IT innovation and service delivery to ensure that our services are effective and efficient from our customers’ perspectives.”
Did NASA ditch OpenStack for Amazon?
“What she did not mention was anything about OpenStack, the infrastructure as a service platform that grew out of initial work by NASA and Rackspace. OpenStack is being pushed as an alternative to Amazon Web Services by several tech heavyweights including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Red Hat. This blog piqued my interest because, in late March, another NASA official said publicly that the agency is backing off additional OpenStack development.”
Marc’s note: The short answer, yes.
It’s hard to understand why NASA is interested in moving into cloud-based IT services in the first place. “Cloud”, basically, is a buzzword meaning “use somebody else’s servers and storage”. It’s a good idea for individuals, or small entities that don’t use enough computer power to justify owning their own servers or storage, or that only needs large amounts of storage at irregular intervals; they can buy into somebody else’s economy of scale. But NASA is large enough that it shouldn’t need to do this to get economy of scale; all that “cloud” does is to give somebody else control of data and security, and add one more failure mode to access.
Why would NASA want to use the “cloud” solutions to IT? There is one reason I can think of, which is that it’s a way to get around complicated and cumbersome acquisition regulations. It may be easier to just give somebody else control than it is to deal with IT procurement.