[djrogers]

I'm not saying this won't be a financial cluster - it likely will cost many times more than planned - but the headline here is just a flat-out lie.

TFA says:

"a March audit report [PDF] from NASA's Inspector General noticed EOSDIS hadn’t properly modeled what data egress charges would do to its cloudy plan."

'Hadn't properly modeled' is very different from 'forgot about'. And if you actually read the linked report, it says things like:

"ESDIS officials said they plan to educate end users on accessing data stored in the cloud, including providing tools to enable them to process the data in the cloud to avoid egress charges." and "To mitigate the challenges associated with potential high egress costs when end-users access data, ESDIS plans to monitor such access and “throttle” back access to the data"

Neither of those statements would be in the audit if the entire topic had been a surprise.

[tyingq]

From that linked report...

"In addition, ESDIS has yet to determine which data sets will transition to the cloud nor has it developed cost models with the benefit of operational experience and metrics for usage and egress."

That sounds fairly close to the headline.