Ray O'Brien, Karen Petraska OpenStack presentation, Fri, 4/20, 10:40 am

1. The Future of Cloud Computing at NASA
Karen Petraska
Service Executive, NASA Computer Services Office
Raymond G. O’Brien
CTO for IT, Ames Research Center
April 20, 2012

2. Past, Present, Future
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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

7. Things We’ve Learned

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. Cloud’s Potential is Becoming More
Evident Within NASA
2009 2012
April 20, 2012

12. 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
04/20/12

13. 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
04/20/12

14. 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 04/20/12

15. 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
04/20/12

16. 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
04/20/12

17. 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 04/20/12

18. 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 04/20/12

19. 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! 04/20/12