[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 I assume NASA has an abundance of outdated hardware and no one to sell these outdated systems to.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?