Nasa goes boldly into the cloud

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (Nasa’s) Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) is one of about 100 US government agencies happy to entrust public cloud services such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) with its compute cycles, applications and data.

Nasa began using the cloud about three years ago, starting with parts of its Mars Exploration Program. Earlier this year, it was named by research firm Gartner as one of the most innovate and productive users of cloud computing on the planet. In this exclusive interview, Tom Soderstrom, chief technology officer (CTO) for IT at Nasa JPL, and Khawaja Shams, a senior software development architect working across several Nasa missions and robotics programmes, discuss Nasa’s ongoing cloud computing migration and why they are surprised comparatively few other government agencies with sensitive data to protect do not take advantage of the scalability and return in investment that public cloud services can provide.

What does Nasa use the cloud for?

Soderstrom: This happens to be a busy period in the JPL’s history right now - we are putting five spacecraft up in a single year, as well as doing robotic exploration projects and looking at things like global climate change - so the reason we do cloud computing is we want to spend more money on science and less on IT. It is surprising to me that so few people are looking at the public cloud because the return on investment (ROI) we have seen has been tremendous.

We are trying to match demand for computing, which is way outstripping our capacity to supply it. They [Nasa] do not want to build datacentres in the future so they are looking at other options, talking to scientists to find out what are the things they cannot solve computing-wise now because the data is too big or the computational resource does not have the capacity.

Shams: Our strategy is the exploration of multiple clouds to keep computing real for our scientists, and we have explored every cloud known to man so we understand how we can move between them [different service provider clouds]. We want to take advantage of multiple clouds to move computing workloads or software into whichever one is most suitable. I help facilitate their migration to the cloud where it makes sense - where cloud represents a safe and efficient approach - while maintaining institutional oversight.