The Future of Cloud Computing at NASA

Karen Petraska

Service Executive, NASA Computer Services Office

Raymond G. O’Brien

CTO for IT, Ames Research CenterApril 20, 2012

From the NASA Strategic Plan:

Goal 6: Share NASA with the public, educators, and students to provide opportunities to participate in our mission, foster innovation and contribute to a strong National economy

• 2009: NASA’s contribution to OpenStack was timely to the introduction of cloud computing to the industry

• 2012: Industry has enthusiastically embraced OpenStack and an increasing number of commercial implementations of OpenStack clouds are now available

• 2012 and Beyond: NASA shifts focus to becoming a wise and informed consumer of commercial cloud services

Past, Present, Future

NASA CIO’s Vision For Cloud Computing

The NASA CIO’s vision for cloud computing at NASA: »To have a good computing environment that addresses

NASA’s computing requirements for all NASA people»Have an easy and seamless way to obtain services,

leveraging economies of scale wherever possible» Innovate how we do security in the cloud; remove as

much burden from the end users as possible»Leverage our buying power and unique requirements to

influence industry where appropriate»Be agile and nimble to embrace and integrate new

technologies that support our mission

Embracing the Technology

The NASA community in general is starting understand the advantages of using the cloud model

NASA is evaluating its application portfolio and experimenting to understand the characteristics of applications that run well in the cloud

NASA is exploring options for and aspects of delivering enterprise cloud services within the NASA environment» Challenges: Governance, Security, Cost Recovery

Success stories in using commercial cloud»JPL BeAMartian and others»NASA Web Environment

NASA’s Computing Environment

NASA requires many types of computing» Business and administrative (highly virtualized today)» Web sites and web applications» Modeling and simulation» Science data processing and analysis» Engineering analysis» Flight command, control, telemetry and flight operations

NASA collaborates with scientists and others all over the world» Universities, corporations, other US Government agencies, foreign space

agencies

Data of interest to NASA resides in many locations depending on the collaborators» Often extremely large data sets» Science data archives of long term scientific interest

Actions to Achieve the Desired Future State

Current activities to support an enterprise cloud service» IaaS focus for now

• Working to understand what platforms will be useful»FedRAMP: A&A for provider controls but what about

consumer controls?»Common Cloud User and Management Interface»Acquisition Strategy»Best approach for user support

• Decision trees for assessing cloud suitability• Managed environments

Things We’ve Learned

What Works Well (and What Doesn’t)

It is easier to birth new applications in the cloud than to migrate legacy applications» Legacy code that has not been ported recently can be very time

consuming to move to cloud, and if it requires out of date or specialized compilers, it may simply not be worth the effort

Applications that are bursty or require many nodes for brief periods of time» Applications that run continuously may not be economical in the cloud

Compute servers that have more than 50% of wall clock time idle Applications that need to be always available but not always running “Embarrassingly parallel” computations (e.g., suitable for Hadoop

processing) work well in the cloud» Applications that require significant inter-processor communication (e.g.

climate models) will be substantially slowed

Economics

The learning curve getting into cloud is steep: developers and systems administrators have to learn new paradigms and work in new ways

Second big investment is moving legacy code into the cloud If the organization has excess capacity in existing data centers and

existing owned computing infrastructure, it may make sense to fully utilize what you already own BEFORE paying for additional capacity in a cloud

Build a business case for each application to decide if a move to cloud is prudent: understand hidden and unanticipated costs. » Costs of getting data into and out of the cloud» Cost of computing cycles» Long term data storage costs» Licenses, IP addresses, etc.

Summary

NASA is embracing cloud computing NASA is working to become a well educated customer of

commercially available cloud services We believe there are aspects of our business that can be

improved through the use of cloud, potentially enabling more work within the same budget

Cloud’s Potential is Becoming More Evident Within NASA

April 12, 2023

2009 2012

Today: Lots of NASA Piloting Activity

Different cloud providers Mission and Enterprise

workloads Private and public cloud

services Becoming an informed

consumer Some already pursuing

steps towards routine use

04/12/23

OpenStack: Creating Competition and Choice

NASA ultimately buys all its on-going services, support, and products

NASA will likely use most major commercial services in the future

Ditto for major private cloud products

As a cloud consumer, NASA wins from competition and choice

04/12/23

NASA’s Continued Community Involvement

NASA is very proud to have been part of the creation of OpenStack

Future participation will shift largely to involvement as a user

Very active Bay Area community makes this easy for Ames

Will strive to keep the original Nebula-based contributor authority active

04/12/23

Climbing up the Stack within NASA

Lots of focus on IaaS layer right now within NASA, but…

Nebula testing feedback showed the high value certain groups place on what equates to platform services

Increasing popularity of SaaS with employees requires guidance and governance

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Leveraging OpenStack’s Success for Future NASA Policy Revision

Commercial Tech Transfer is a high priority for NASA

OpenStack is a shining example

Current NASA policy is being reviewed for possible revision to allow more NASA involvement in community SW development products

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Product Positioning for Future NASA Use

Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP)

FedRAMP will be Key to Future Authorized NASA Cloud Use of Commercial Clouds

Cloud features that facilitate or address NIST 800-53 control implementation will be highly valued

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NASA’s OpenStack List for Santa

Easy to install distributions Many commercial service

providers Lots of value-add tool and

support providers Lots of priced enterprise-class

customer support options Tight alignment with

FedRAMP and NIST security requirements

Niche features enabling HPC cloud

Continued rapid feature development

04/12/23

And Finally…

A much deserved thank you from NASA to:» The Nebula project team and

all its sponsors and supporters

» Rackspace Hosting

» The entire OpenStack community

Together you have created something truly special that will benefit the industry and all consumers of cloud

Congratulations!

04/12/23