[anthonylukach]

This article seems short sighted.

1. Using the AWS cost calculator is pointless, naturally an entity the size of NASA would get heavily discounted rates. 2. As data volume grows, the complexities of working with that data expands. NASA appears to be embracing cloud computing by embracing a paradigm where scientists push computation to where the data rests rather than downloading data [1], [2], [3], thereby paying egress on only the higher order data products. 3. The report notes that NASA has tooling to rate limit and throttle access to data. This, in itself, proves that NASA didn't "[forget] about eye-watering cloudy egress costs before lift-off".

People may scream about vendor lock in, which is a fair complaint; but acting like NASA just didn't think about egress is misleading.

NASA is ultimately a science institution, I think diverting effort away from infrastructure management and towards studying data is likely a wise decision.

[1: https://www.hec.nasa.gov/news/features/2018/cloud_computing_...] [2: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10712-019-09541-z] [3: https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2017AGUFMIN21F..02P/abstra...]

[Supermancho]

> NASA would get heavily discounted rates

Having spent a lot of money with AWS, that's giving Amazon more credit than I think is warranted.

[owenmarshall]

What is “a lot?”

Datapoint: When $company hit very high six figures (closing in on seven) in monthly spend I found AWS was incredibly willing to cut our egress rates, often by a significant amount.

This was explained by our account team: bandwidth has some of the best margins for AWS but they’re willing to sacrifice that for their enterprise customers (read: suck us in closer to non-commodity services)

[ganstyles]

+1 to this. I've been on teams that spent $75k/mo and didn't get any hint of a discount. Though we got our own on call rep to handle issues.

[soared]

$75k/mo is tiny in the enterprise world. At Oracle they’d give a 22 year old fresh out of school ~30 accounts that size, for reference. I worked on a team of 9ish on a ~$5MM/mo account. (Not cloud, but a comparable business unit)

[bosswipe]

At which level do you start having real negotiation power?

[Mandatum]

$10MM/year is considered a big deal to large enterprise in NA, $1MM outside of NA.

[gkolli]

NA is North America, correct?

[ganstyles]

Wow! I had a feeling our spend was a little low compared to big players, but I didn't realize how far off I was!

[tedivm]

I've been on teams spending half of that, and managed to get great discounts.

My question whenever I hear that people didn't is who did they ask? AWS doesn't just jump in to give people free service- but if you reach out to them and tell them you need it they tend to work with companies.

[punnerud]

The Norwegian map authority (Kartverket) found it way to expensive to use cloud for it’s 12PB. How would it be more viable for NASA? https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&...

[kempbellt]

>NASA is ultimately a science institution, I think diverting effort away from infrastructure management and towards studying data is likely a wise decision.

Indeed. I am glad to see them leveraging the power of an already proven infrastructure provider rather than spending X billions of dollars trying to build and maintain their own.

[dsl]

> the power of an already proven infrastructure provider

Every major cloud provider is using Linux network drivers written by NASA employees.

In 1994 the NASA Beowulf project pioneered the idea of clustering together cheap commodity hardware to replace mainframes (this concept was later used to bootstrap hardware for Google)

NASA helped start the OpenStack project which powers a number of cloud providers.

Heck, NASA helped invent the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer.

[ksec]

>NASA helped start the OpenStack...

Does anyone still uses OpenStack? It seems to have been super hyped and then disappeared.

[thaeli]

It's quietly powering a lot of private clouds these days.

[sgt]

No, that is just ridiculous. NASA is more than capable of running their own server infrastructure. They've got expertise, they've got DC's and they don't need 99.999% uptime for most of their services. Cloud providers can turn out to be insanely expensive. I am not against cloud - mostly I would recommend it for businesses but when reaching a certain size you have to consider doing your own cloud infrastructure.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah. It seems like everyone is hopping aboard that bandwagon and doesn't remember a world before 2009. For $1M, you can get yourself a very beefy server farm.

AWS accounts still take management and a team of people that need to maintain a whole lot of different aspects of it, so you're not really saving on headcount. You're just moving that capex to opex.

It's important to be flexible enough to be able to deploy onto a cloud provider if the situation demands (e.g., new client demands infrastructure run in $FOREIGN_REGION_X where you don't already have a DC), but everyone's insistence on going 1000% AWS is absurd and IMO totally unjustifiable.

[unpopdancetrio]

I agree with you.... but no one wants the responsibility of securing the servers and keeping the hardware up to date. I assume NASA has an abundance of outdated hardware and no one to sell these outdated systems to. My fear is we will lose this ability to create our own servers in the future. My degree program had nothing dealing with cloud, I would tell the professors that IBM blumix and M$oft Azure was the future. My outlook toward the future was close, who knew the book store would be the biggest cloud provider. Nearly every company I worked for had a big initiative to go to the cloud. One infrastructure guy told me the final decision came when they realized they had no way to train the next generation, cloud upfront cost is less risky, and its nice to have someone else to point fingers toward when things do not work as expected.

[kempbellt]

Sure, they are certainly capable of doing it themselves, but why should they?

For what AWS provides, the DIY approach would be insanely expensive and wasteful. Not to mention, it would take years to build a basic MVP. They'd have to scope out the project, hire people just to design it, and then pay for several contractors just to stand up the first iteration of a working system (which will still not compare to AWS in terms of resiliency, redundancy, and accessibility), and then maintain it....forever. Also, many people already know how to interact with AWS. NASA would also need to design and maintain user-access methods to the data, on top of just plugging in thousands of hard drives and making them all work nicely together.

Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good wheel manufacturer that has already proven extremely successful at what they do?

[pathseeker]

>NASA is ultimately a science institution, I think diverting effort away from infrastructure management and towards studying data is likely a wise decision.

True, but once you're a certain scale, outsourcing everything just because it's not your competency isn't a good excuse. You can afford to hire enough people for it to become your competency.

[tda]

Probably there is even good competition between the cloud providers, because hosting the data means that you can sell a lot of compute time to all the users of the data. NASA choosing for AWS means that any IO intensive analysis on that data will run faster/better/cheaper on AWS.

[eeZah7Ux]

No, there isn't, and going for the quasi-monopolist only encourages lock-in.

[tspike]

Microsoft especially has been aggressive in courting large companies away from AWS for cloud needs.

[matchagaucho]

Yeah, this looks like a FUD hit job, possibly by entities made obsolete by a move to AWS.

There are just too many solutions to egress optimization to mention (CDN edge caching, rate limit, throttling, tiered discounts, multi-year agreements).

No gov procurement deal at this scale gets sticker shock from retail prices.

[marrickvillain]

Totally and utterly not a FUD hit job. Just a reporter finding a document that told a story. I am that reporter. And FWIW when people push a dirty story that's clearly in their interests to have in print, I either don't write it because I won't be their cats-paw, or I mention it in the story. This was in plain sight, but I guess hadn't been read by anyone who understands cloud.

[NotSammyHagar]

Thanks for the story by the way. I thought it was great.

[9nGQluzmnq3M]

It's the Register, their trademark is equal-opportunity snark about everything and everybody.

[btilly]

Using the AWS cost calculator is pointless, naturally an entity the size of NASA would get heavily discounted rates.

I strongly doubt this.

Amazon seems to work heavily on the principle that they charge their cost + a small margin. Which means that they can't heavily discount without going below their actual costs.

[payamb]

The organisation I’m working for gets a nice %25 discount on quite a lot of AWS products

[solarkraft]

> Amazon seems to work heavily on the principle that they charge their cost + a small margin

In their retail business. They finance that operation through the relatively high margin AWS.

[justinclift]

> + a small margin

If by "small margin" you mean "several hundred percent", then sure.