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NASA CIO Dumps NASA-Developed Open Stack

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
June 19, 2012
Filed under , ,

IT Reform at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, NASA CIO
“Finally, NASA shifted to a new web services model that uses Amazon Web Services for cloud-based enterprise infrastructure. This cloud-based model supports a wide variety of web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based, and secure environment while providing almost a million dollars in cost savings each year.
NASA Drops OpenStack For Amazon Cloud
“Ray O’Brien, acting CIO at NASA Ames, when asked May 30 by InformationWeek about NASA’s participation, used diplomatic language to say that NASA still endorsed the project, was proud of its founding role, and might be a user of OpenStack components in the future. “It is very possible that NASA could leverage OpenStack as a customer in the future,” he wrote in his email response. … [NASA CIO Linda] Cureton’s reference to “an interoperable, standards-based environment” could have been taken from the OpenStack playbook. Amazon Web Services, to which Cureton was actually referring, uses proprietary Amazon Machine Images as the basis for workloads that run in its Elastic Compute Cloud … But nowhere in her references to an open environment was there any mention of OpenStack. At the same time, OpenStack has gained the backing of 175 other companies–including IBM, HP, Red Hat, Del,l and Intel–as the primary open source cloud offering.”

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6 responses to “NASA CIO Dumps NASA-Developed Open Stack”

  1. Nox Anonymous says:
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    Different directorates from different centers are mandating too much. It’s sad to see this occurring at a much higher scale. For Flight projects, or R&D maybe eventual Flight projects I’d love to see a change. It should be a particular  Project Management decision to use or not use a certain solution or whatever. Different Software, API’s, libraries, or solutions are like tools in a toolbox. You should not mandate to use a wrench when a screwdriver is required. Better to choose the best tool for the job at hand. I’ve seen NASA mandate a CNC lathe when a hand drill will do it better.

    • David_McEwen says:
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      In an ideal world, using the best solution for the task at hand is preferable. In a cost-constrained world, that is not always an option. Standardization and economy of scale can sometimes outweigh the benefits of uniquely implemented solutions.

      In this specific case of cloud computing, I’m not sure what trade-offs NASA considered. Most likely it is cost of supporting internal infrastructure and staff vs the cost of an external service level agreement. If someone else (Amazon) can provide a better, cheaper cloud service than NASA can, that’s a win for NASA.

      I’m guessing this award was from a request for bid, which would give some additional indication of NASA’s thinking.

  2. Tom Dayton says:
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    NASA is supporting at least one other open source software system: Open Mission Control Technologies. 

  3. hikingmike says:
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    Well hopefully they keep it in vigorous development or if not, hopefully the other players do. I doubt Rackspace, IBM, HP, et al would discontinue supporting it (against an Amazon competitor) as they support many other open source projects when it makes sense as well.  It seems like a very worthy open source project
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wik

  4. Steve Whitfield says:
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    After the initial teething problems are over, I don’t see how this can be anything but beneficial. Maybe they can use this change to help improve on NASA’s documentation standards and web site processes as well. I’ll be curious to see how HQ handles holdouts from the change. I think it’s long past time that NASA got tough with these issues.

    Steve

  5. no one of consequence says:
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    This is due to three things – Nebula as a profit making Open Stack venture, the availability of a AWS path to open API’s that Eucalyptus Systems provides,  and the success of Open Stack.

    Amazon AWS works with proprietary “closed” APIs and special hidden software. Yet it dominates cloud services.

    This is to get NASA out of the cloud services development business. Once you do that, its hard for them to ignore the dominance of AWS to avoid translating hardware purchases into AWS instances.

    Open Stack needs those 175 companies to invest to make it more competitive with AWS quickly to attract NASA (and other government agency) business to an equal or better level. Which can and should be done.

    Not NASA.