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Feds To Adopt 'Cloud First' IT Policy
theodp writes "The White House Thursday announced plans to restructure IT by consolidating federal government data centers and applications, and adopting a so-called 'cloud first' policy. Unveiled by federal CIO Vivek Kundra, the 25-Point Plan (PDF) calls for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015, as well as shifting work to cloud computing systems. The new 'Cloud First' policy cites the ability of Animoto.com to scale vs. the government's short-lived Cars.gov (Cash for Clunkers), although Google Trends suggests this may be somewhat of an apple-to-oranges comparison for justifying a national IT strategy. As long as we're talking clouds, a tag cloud of the 25-Point Plan underscores that the Feds are counting more on IT Program and Contract Management rather than Computer Science wizardry to deliver 'the productivity improvements that private industry has realized from IT.' Not to be a buzzkill, but those of you celebrating CS Education Week might be advised to consider an MBA if you want a Federal IT career."
and If Obama is a racist, he would hire an Indian to take care of IT, a Jew to take care of money, and himself to take care of basketball.
We're moving this way in academia as well: it used to be that every research group doing anything of note with computers had to have its own servers, but the vast majority just sit idle all the time, and the maintenance overhead and potential for maintenance disruptions is very large (if your one main server has a hard drive failure, everything is on hold until you scramble to fix it). The trend has been to virtualize those, unless you're a research group with particularly high or specific computational needs, like doing cluster-computing or systems research.
The main open question is whether the virtualization will go mainly internally or externally. Should we just buy some EC2 instances from Amazon? Or should the department (or school, or university) maintain some compute resources that individual research groups can request virtual-machines on?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
It means third party, Internet connected, managed services.
For example, a company that offers network connected scalable processing and bandwidth services is offering "cloud" services.
Like Amazon.com, for example. Amazon.com offers this as one of their services. They used to sell this service to some-one called "Wikileaks".
Interesting fact: Amazon stopped selling those services to Wikileaks, and lied about why. Amazon claimed they were suspending the hosting because Wikileaks had published 250,000 embassy cables without vetting them first. But this was untrue. Questions have been asked as to why Amazon.com did this, and Amazon.com claimed this false smear in order to deflect the allegation that they had done so under government pressure, something they denied in the same press release.
Now the Feds are announcing a massive move over to cloud computing, a move that will result in hundreds of millions of dollars to those companies who get the contracts.
I wonder why Amazon.com dropped Wikileaks as a customer. And why they felt the need to lie about why. And why they did this just before hundreds of millions of dollars became available for services like the ones they offer, from an organization that really doesn't like Wikileaks.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I heard some place called 'Wikileaks' was offering the government a good deal for cheap cloud hosting.
I welcome this move. Sure hope you have enough of an infrastructure to keep, say, taxpayer SSNs, DOBs, mother's maiden names out of the cloud, not to mention the inevitable access to this cloud resource by the SIPRnet.
It's a good time for government transparency, whether intentional or not.
Clouds don't leak right? I mean, there's no way any sensitive information could make its way out of there on some Root Access Inter-Node something.
I work as a federal contractor at a Department of Interior funded datacenter that is actually suppose to be taking on the 'work' from some of the downsized datacenters. Comical bit is, we've known about this for well over a year prior to TFA, and it's a total bean-counter move. The goal is "use less servers, and less operating systems". We still have zero idea what we are getting in, who we're getting it from, what it'll be, ect. To me, we're preparing more for straight P2V virtualization than we at all worried about some desk jockey's 'cloud' buzzword he put in his report.
Daily unique visitors: slashdot.com vs. cars.gov vs. animoto.com
It means third party, Internet connected, managed services.
I would hope that the government used their own "cloud" datacenters, either managed by GS employees or a contractor, rather than a completely commercial facility...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Remote sites don't have a lot of bandwidth to do mass cloud and with only a few data centers all it takes is one back hoe to lead to a shut down while the cable is being fixed.
Management productivity improvements are a lot of BS that leads to alot paper work and people waiting a long just to get the tools to they need to do there job. Just what we need more MBA PHB's.
Some remote sites are on Satellite Internet that with FAP and high lag will suck when the on side data sever goes away.
Having a background in government, I can say, from their perspective, cloud services are a big win. It's not perfect, but it's a better deal than they get from any of their contract IT services.
Cloud services would have sunk NMCI before EDS sank the Navy. The billions the Navy spent on managed networks to get a desktop PC, email and productivity software was one of the biggest wastes of taxpayer money ever.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Simple minded people tend to think all decisions are simple. Sorry, but in the real world, decisions are usually for a number of reasons, not just one. Sometimes there is one issue that is the final one that spurred action, but that doesn't mean there wasn't an avalanche of reasons in addition to it that was the basis of even considering it.
"Cloud" is just a way of saying you have a standardized, generic way of scaling your systems. The new buzzword adds an excuse to outsource the whole thing to a "reputable" supplier and avoid taking any responsibility. If your needs are small this is a great concept. You get to use the same iron as the big boys, without the up front investments.
For someone the size of the government however, I think it's rather strange they are not using clouds already. They may never have called them clouds, but surely they have some reasonable in-house systems architects, no?
as someone who's allergic to buzzwords - WTF is the difference between "cloud computer services" and "a VMWare instance on a suitably redundant infrastructure with a reputable hosting firm"?
This makes some sense if you're a relatively small company which could neither afford nor justify that sort of infrastructure for themselves. But the government?
So now we learn the real reason Jamie & Adam visited the White House recently...
>> 24 Launch “myth-busters” education campaign
SIGLOST && SIGUNUSED && SIGQUIT
Wait a minute. I'm a manager, and I've been reading a lot of case studies and watching a lot of webcasts about The Cloud. Based on all of this glorious marketing literature, I, as a manager, have absolutely no reason to doubt the safety of any data put in The Cloud.
The case studies all use words like "secure", "MD5", "RSS feeds" and "encryption" to describe the security of The Cloud. I don't know about you, but that sounds damn secure to me! Some Clouds even use SSL and HTTP. That's rock solid in my book.
And don't forget that you have to use Web Services to access The Cloud. Nothing is more secure than SOA and Web Services, with the exception of perhaps SaaS. But I think that Cloud Services 2.0 will combine the tiers into an MVC-compliant stack that uses SaaS to increase the security and partitioning of the data.
My main concern isn't with the security of The Cloud, but rather with getting my Indian team to learn all about it so we can deploy some first-generation The Cloud applications and Web Services to provide the ultimate platform upon which we can layer our business intelligence and reporting, because there are still a few verticals that we need to leverage before we can move to The Cloud 2.0.
"We can leak ourselves way better than any upstart Wikileaks wannabe, ha!"
Geeks are so full of shit that "beating the crap out of them" takes a whole new meaning.
The statement I quoted. Which is still on their website several days later.
If it had been withdrawn at the time, you might have a case for claiming they believed someone else's lie, but it's still up there, long after everyone at Amazon have been made aware that the statement is factually false.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
We had just that setup in the 1960s and the 1970s at the universities I worked at. We called them "mainframes".
Then we spent most of the 1980s and 1990s trying to get rid of them, because highly centralized systems are often extremely expensive to build and maintain, and usually don't actually provide what each of the many users actually requires.
In terms of reliability, it's better for a single department or lab to be unable to get their work done due to software or hardware failure of some sort, rather than the entire campus being shit out of luck when the mainframe, err, "cloud", has issues.
You fools will spend the next decade getting this "cloud" bullshit put in place. Then around 2020 or so, you'll have had 10 years worth of problems. You'll then spend until 2030 trying to undo the mess. Sometime around 2040 you'll succeed, but by that time the current IT staff will have forgotten the problems that "cloud computing" caused between 2010 and 2020, and then by 2050 they'll be in the process of centralizing again...
And why they did this just before hundreds of millions of dollars became available for services like the ones they offer, from an organization that really doesn't like Wikileaks.
You do understand that a strategic decision like this takes months, if not years to make, right ? That someone didn't just wake up a week ago and decide "we're going cloud" ?
that party owns your data.
Wait until Cheney puts the Energy Task Force papers on the cloud. Only then will you know it is secure.
Correction:
...call for cutting 800+ data centers by 2015 as well as shifting work to privately owned data centers.
If I hear someone talk about cloud computing again I think I’ll lose my lunch.
That said, Vivek Kundra is a fraud. Anything coming from his mouth is tainted. At the very least the guy lied on his resume about having a degree in biology, then all of a sudden his bio changed and he LOST the degree! Good thing there’s an internet archive!
Others agree:
http://www.dvorak.org/blog/2009/08/12/special-report-is-us-chief-information-officer-cio-vivek-kundra-a-phony/
http://www.businessinsider.com/americas-cio-vivek-kundra-must-go-2009-3
http://www.economicpopulist.org/content/obamas-cio-vivek-kundra-previous-close-employees-arrested-fraud-bribery
http://tech.rightpundits.com/?p=36
Aerith second.
As the Federal CIO sang the praises of Amazon.com-backed Animoto's use of the Amazon Cloud, the Chairman of the Recovery Board decided giving Amazon the contract to host Recovery.gov was the right thing to do, and called on the public to 'imagine if other, much larger federal agencies were to follow our lead.'
Credit for deciding to tap Amazon was given to government contractor Smartronix, who reportedly used AWS in the development and testing of recovery.gov, but did not go live with it in the initial roll-out.
The government planned to find another home for the more than $1 million in computer hardware and software that were previously purchased to host the (apparently) relatively low-traffic Recovery.gov site, but were no longer needed after hosting was switched to Amazon.
This doesn't sound a like a good idea if you ask me.
http://saveie6.com/
First of all, there is no cloud. A "cloud computing system" is a server and/or group of servers. All they're doing is closing down data centers and moving the data to either someone else's or other government centers. Second, if it "is" managed services who's managing it? If I have a data center in Houston run by say the IRS and I'm an employee in Bridgport and my files are on servers in Houston then I'm "cloud" computing. This is an over-hyped bunch of crap. While everyone is drooling over the new marketing term think about the big elephant in the room. Yeah, we call him Tim. Know what he's doing? Firing all those people in those data centers that are closing down. The nice thing about "moving to the cloud" or more correctly "outsourcing" is that eventually, they come back. Why? Because putting your stuff in someone else's hands just to free yours eventually makes you wonder about what you had in your hands. It's like sending your friend shopping with your girlfriend. You start to wonder what they're doing when they've been gone too long.
But does it run Linux?
Nonsense. That's exactly how it happens. Decision makers come up with half baked shit all the time at a moments notice. Then they turn it over to the rest of the minions to salvage what they can. It's just that (in government especially) screwing around for years to study the problem is status quo.
Case in point. If the government had their shit together, they would have went straight to wikilweaks to begin with, and exercised a little editorial control. If you ask me bureaucracies spend half their time with the head in the cloud and the other half up their a$$.
It's like sending your friend shopping with your girlfriend. You start to wonder what they're doing when they've been gone too long.
Your points are all perfectly salient, but this makes me think you need better friends and/or a better girlfriend.
Good point. :p
E Cumulonimbus Unum
My dad spent most of his career as a developer for a federal agency. He always lamented that the direction of the organization would change according to electoral results. Not so much because R's and D's disagree on how to run IT, but because a new regime means new appointees at the top. The tendency is for them to advocate for the latest and greatest (buzzword) so that they can show cool bullet-points for their bosses. In reality, the IT planning/testing/implementation cycle in a federal bureaucracy turns out to usually be longer than the election cycle so the impact is minimal. By the time it's conclusively proven that the .NET/Java/Oracle/Cloud solution does not work, there's a new boss in place and a new hype-cycle to chase.
The US Government version of the cloud will have a direct line to Wikileaks to save time.
Many custom applications are finicky about their environment, such as database, web server, and library version. You can't just slap them on a different generic box and have them work as-is. If the tuner is far away and detached, then they won't have any feel for a given application. You get a generic server monkey who has no knowledge or feel for YOUR shop's particulate application.
Sure, one could "fix" the problem by having more programmers and testers to make the apps more transferable, but that also has a cost associated with it; likely more than the savings of going with a generic cloud.
Clouds sound great on paper, but not always in practice. Maybe for file-only servers, it could work, but not applications.
Table-ized A.I.
No problem, I only send her out with slashdot readers ;-)
Table-ized A.I.
Far cheaper to pwn the government in toto, as you'll be able to attack at points of intersection and consolidation rather than across thousands of servers spread throughout hundreds of buildings. And way cheaper to offshore the whole kit and kaboodle once the work of migrating to "the cloud" is done.
Yup...government is being run like a business: Zilch in the way of advantages to the American people or the nation other than cost.
They didn't learn squat from WikiLeaks.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
The characteristics of a cloud are not ideally suited to reliable data storage. Clouds are well known to be ephemeral and to change their size, shape and density according to the dictates of the local climate. Furthermore, clouds are much less substantial than they appear and can be blown away by the winds which spring up apparently at random - a whiff of senator's breath/wind can blow away a cloud. Clouds can evaporate and leave one defenseless in the glare of whatever it was that just zapped your cloud... Clouds are out of your control... Clouds do not have long life spans... Clouds become distorted and sometimes appear as fog.... We all know the fates of those with their heads in the clouds... So, don't say you were not warned!
Have you read the statement? It says they withdrew hosting because they believe Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to the content. They also say they are worried about the verification of the 250K cables they are publishing (not: have published).
Have you read the statement [amazon.com]? It says they withdrew hosting because they believe Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to the content. They also say they are worried about the verification of the 250K cables they are publishing (not: have published).
What do you do when they worry about you?
An ISP should not have to "worry" about customers content. This is a matter of law, except when some people abuse the law and circumvent it for their own benefit.
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
mm you would have thought that the wiki-leaks fiasco would have lead to a re assessment of the eggs in one basket approach - at least for those applications requiring security which is 99% of them
sorry what are you smoking DEC owned that space in the 60s and 70's with the PDP range and the VAX took over in the Mid to late 80's
What do you do when they worry about you?
They were not worried about being liable for the content, they were worried about the (future) content putting people in jeopardy. Since the content they were worried about was not published yet, that in itself that was not a valid reason for the takedown IMO. The fact that Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to then content was the main reason they stated. You can argue about that as well (legitimate purposes for publishing, freedom of press, etc...), but that was their reason.
The point is that Amazon did not lie in its statement. That doesn't make their reasons valid, but they did not lie.
Kind of sad that you don't get that cloud computing is real. Let me break it down for you, simply. A virtualized environment where growing the pool of available compute time is as simply as adding another node to a cluster. Clearly, Captain Obvious realizes there are servers involved, but that's just the lowest layer in the thing. In other news, the Fed Gov sales reps & SEs at VMware are currently weeping with joy.
The unsig!
The cloud is a lie?
He has a Mac, so no worries. She's probably helping him to decide which shoes to buy.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Have you read the statement [amazon.com]? It says they withdrew hosting because they believe Wikileaks doesn't own the rights to the content. They also say they are worried about the verification of the 250K cables they are publishing (not: have published).
What do you do when they worry about you?
An ISP should not have to "worry" about customers content. This is a matter of law, except when some people abuse the law and circumvent it for their own benefit.
Not only that, what "rights to the content" are we even talking about? Nothing involved here is copyrighted in any way at all.
Having worked for the federal government, it sounds like managers are just trying to outsource the risk of IT failure, so it will not be their fault if something goes wrong (along with getting brownie points for having their "cloud" initiative adopted, thus maybe a fat paying job in private industry.) After all who gets noticed for just making the same old (constantly changing) systems work. Sorry for sounding cynical, but the how the system works.
It's like sending your friend shopping with your girlfriend. You start to wonder what they're doing when they've been gone too long.
Your points are all perfectly salient, but this makes me think you need better friends and/or a better girlfriend.
This is slashdot. You built your best friend and your girlfriend. You can build better ones!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
IMO a cloud is more about attitude and software than hardware.
The traditional attitude to hosting is to give each server a workload or set of workloads (which may be either yours or a clients) on a semi-permanent basis and if there is a problem with a server get an admin to deal with it ASAP because while there may be some redudancy losing a few servers in the wrong place or an overload of the machines providing a particular service is likely to be a big problem.
The cloud attitude is to decouple the logical structure from the physical structure such that no human has to know or care what workload is on what server. Once you've done that you can further introduce automatic scaling of the resource allocation to meet current workloads and automatic migration when a host needs to be taken offline, is overloaded or just plain crashes (though in the last case the migration will be less seemless, probablly comparable to an unexpected reboot of a conventional server).
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Government policy on what is done internally vs. what is done externally is shaped very strongly by:
1) Politicians with (or attempting to appeal to consituents with) the belief that everything is inherently magically more efficient done outside of government,
2) Politicians seeking to appeal to big-money interests, including those receiving government contracts,
3) Politicians and managers who very much want someone else to blame when things go wrong.
Contracting out, even for essential, core services, appeals to all of those interests.
Correction..."successfully implemented" strategic decisions like this take months, if not years. In IT, it seems most people who have power to tell it to do anything believe what they want can be implemented today, properly, without prior planning, and without adverse consequence. In other words, most people who have power to direct IT have no business directing IT.
At least, that has been my experience...take that for what you will.
RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.