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NEBULA: NASA'S STRATEGIC CL OUD
JLindsay wrote in the November 16, 2009, blog. This is a strate-
gic goal of NASA: increasing its participation in open source
projects and reaping the benefit of more open source devel-
opers being involved in reviewing and testing the code it pro-
duces.
“The ease of being able to pluck computing power out of
the cloud will make a lot of new technologies more accessible.
Free and open source software will hopefully be a big part of
an efficient, transparent and cloud-empowered government,”
JLindsay concluded. The assumption is that open source de-
velopment activity focused on one federal cloud will be easily
transferred to other federal clouds, if it is decided that more
data centers will be built on the cloud pattern. Such an ap-
proach would have the effect of standardizing the software in
the data centers and lowering their cost.
According to information posted on the Nebula Web site,
“the platform itself will help facilitate the adoption of open
source software across the Government. Because of the ease
of spinning up virtual machines and having a library of pre-
made machine images, almost anybody (whether in IT or not)
can set themselves up with an environment in which to test
open source solutions in just a few minutes. This lowers the
barrier to entry for trying new software, eliminating the down-
loading, installing and configuring, and providing a tempo-
rary test bed for experimentation and evaluation.”
The Nebula cloud software is being written to run on Neb-
ula’s containerized x86 data center servers. The Ames Re-
search Center last year received delivery of a 40-foot Verari
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