NASA has retreated from OpenStack, the open source infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud computing platform it helped RackSpace launch by contributing its Nebula (Nova) compute controller.
Apparently NASA doesn’t want to play developer anymore. Instead, it’s on an “IT reform” tear that started a year ago.
This reform has a lot to do with NASA watching how it spends the taxpayer’s dime and using commercial cloud services when appropriate.
Ah, but the sweet irony is – according to a June 8 blog posting by NASA CIO Linda Cureton – that the agency has “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.”