Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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?
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...
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
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.
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.
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.