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NEBULA: NASA'S STRATEGIC CL OUD

Open Source Nebula,” that the space agency “spends far too
much on IT. Each NASA group typically builds its own data
center, and procurement can take as long as 40 weeks for a
Web site. Nebula aims to reduce this time to a few minutes.”
NASA reportedly hosts 3,000 internal and external Web
sites today in its various data centers; the federal government

as a whole has 100,000 Web sites. What would be the savings
if they and future NASA Web sites could all be hosted in the
Nebula cloud? In an update on the situation, NASA spokesper-
sons say that a small staff of trained Web site developers could
maintain many different Web sites built in a shared infra-
structure, such as Nebula. That’s impossible as long as each
NASA agency has its own data center and its own Web site staff

doing things in its own unique way.
Although software is still being written for the site, Nebula
has made extensive use of freely available open source code.
It includes the Linux operating system and the Linux cluster
file system, Lustre File System, from Sun Microsystems, which
is used by 15 of the largest supercomputing clusters in the
world and is designed to work across thousands of servers in a
single cluster. Nebula also uses the Django Web application
framework, a tool for rapid building of lightweight Python

scripting language Web applications, and Solr, an open source
indexing and search engine.
One of its key components is the open source Eucalyptus
Project’s cloud application programming interfaces (APIs),
which mimic the basic functions of Amazon Web Services’
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Because of that, “all Amazon

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