Substantial cost savings and greater efficiencies—the main promises of cloud computing—along with recent government initiatives like the OMB’s Cloud First Policy and the Federal Cloud Computing Strategy are driving numerous agencies to investigate and invest in cloud computing. On Wednesday, February 23rd, DLT sponsored a webcast with i360Gov.com titled, Best Practices for Achieving Migration to a Cloud Model. During the webcast, viewers learned the steps government agencies should take to move to cloud-based solutions. DLT’s own Van Ristau (CTO), NIST’s Dawn Leaf and In-Stat’s Greg Potter all presented their perspectives on the matter. If you missed it, don’t worry, you can view the archived version here.

Within service delivery circles, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) has moved from buzzword to staple over the past 5 years. The ideas of loosely coupled services that hang together instead of a bespoke monolithic application has changed the software landscape. Decoupling sources and consumers of data provides flexibility and scalability in application and infrastructure design. The hype may have moved on, but what's left behind is a solid, practicable architecture. Asynchronous, message based interfaces extend the time and space divide further. Reusable components increase the speed of delivery and creation of new services. Diverging application resources drag diverging data sources along the path. Accessing unrelated data sources from a SOA based environment requires some unifying view, be it a consolidated hub that replicates data from different sources or a data federation service that manages abstract aggregation logic. Monolithic siloed applications can be leveraged while being decomposed into component functional service areas.

Exalogic Larry Ellison continued his key note from Sunday by reintroducing Exalogic a “high performance server with hardware and middleware specifically designed for running public or private cloud systems. “ We spent a lot of time optimizing Oracle software to run on the Exalogic box,” Larry said. He referred to Exalogic as “one big honkin’ cloud,” and called the system “the fastest computer for running Java applications software” and said “it could be used for application consolidation or for running both public and private cloud systems.” The internal components of the system include: The Oracle Exalogic Elastic Cloud server combines 64-bit x86 hardware, a total of 30 compute servers with 360 cores, with Oracle middleware such as the Weblogic server, Oracle Coherence data grid software, JRockit Java runtime software and Oracle VM virtualization software. The system uses infiniBand technology (capable of handling 40 gigabits per second) to link its internal components, has 2.8 TB of DRAM, 4TB of read cache and 960 GB of solid-state disk storage. Oracle will offer Linux and the Solaris operating systems with Exalogic.

The White House recently released its Federal Cloud Computing Strategy on February 8, 2011. The new strategy is in conjunction with the OMB’s Cloud First Policy which is intended to accelerate the pace at which federal agencies implement a cloud strategy. According to the document, this strategy is designed to: • Articulate the benefits, considerations, and trade-offs of cloud computing • Provide a decision framework and case examples to support agencies in migrating towards cloud computing • Highlight cloud computing implementation resources • Identify Federal Government activities and roles and responsibilities for catalyzing cloud adoption By now, I’m sure just about everyone is familiar with the many benefits cloud computing offers. So I can safely bet that instead of asking “why,” your question now is “how.” And with this new push released by the White House, there isn’t a better time to get the answer and begin the implementation process.

So over a year into the Cloud Computing marketing machine, does anyone really understand what it is? You hear about vendors such as Terremark, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, etc. offering some form of cloud computing. But what do they really offer? Can any agency just move their email or applications “into the cloud?” Let’s start with a definition… What types of Cloud Computing are there? Cloud computing breaks down into one of 3 areas: • Infrastructure as a Service: This is the traditional Managed Server Providers like Rackspace that provides their server to a customer on a monthly or yearly basis. Infrastructure such as power, data networking, and cooling are offloaded to them, and applications and operating system are the customer’s responsibility. • Platform as a Service: This is a model that vendors such as Google Apps and Amazon operate in. The vendor provides a “platform,” whether that’s email services, web, or storage hosting. This pulls the management of the underlying application and operating system to the vendor from the customer. This allows the customer to quickly add capacity if needed on demand. • Software as a Service: These are the ASPs (application service providers) such as SalesForce.com, Oracle CRM on Demand, and Remedy on Demand. The ASP hosts all aspects of the application and platform, and provides access in a multi-tenant environment that is shared across all their customers.

Managers in the Public Sector are wrestling with the wide range of options provided by the evolving Cloud services paradigm. Most are now familiar with the three Cloud service models (SaaS, PaaS, IaaS) and more than a few are testing the waters. The proliferation of Cloud services from a wide range of name brand vendors and the success stories from commercial companies provides a certain level of confidence that government agencies can realize similar economies in shifting to the Cloud for at least some IT services. Indeed, OMB, in its ‘Cloud First’ policy, has mandated serious consideration of the Cloud by agencies as the federal Data Center Consolidation initiative is implemented.

The below blog was written by and published with permission by Steve O’Keeffe. Steve O’Keeffe is the founder of MeriTalk – www.meritalk.com – the government IT network. MeriTalk is an online community that hosts professional networking, thought leadership, and focused events to drive the government IT dialogue. A 20-year veteran of the government IT community, O’Keeffe has worked in government and industry. In addition to MeriTalk, he founded Telework Exchange, GovMark Council, and O’Keeffe & Company Okay, the sexual tension is finally over. Agencies are starting to consummate their cloud love. First, GSA gets it on with Google with Unisys as chaperone. Less than a week later, USDA takes a roll in the hay with Microsoft. Seems that love letters are the first cloud apps - both awards are for e-mail and collaboration platforms. So, let's take a closer look at these celebrity romances.

Evaluating agency needs in the face of new directives like the Federal Cloud Computing Initiative can be daunting. Analyzing emerging technology in terms of an enterprise architecture is complicated at best, but divorcing the service mission from the technology can highlight less disruptive paths for integrating new paradigms. Understanding and leveraging the benefits of a loosely coupled design will make technology shifts attainable. Cloud computing is the next step in computing evolution. The concepts and techniques in play are the culmination of years converging technologies. We are seeing the perfect storm of technology and practice bringing out a new and exciting methodology. Cloud architecture promises all of the features that system architects and administrators have struggled to deliver for years: elastic, scalable, fault tolerant computing resources.

I believe cloud computing will become the default IT delivery model for public sector organizations within the next five years. Some may think that this conclusion is “stating the obvious” while others may doubt the ability of public sector organizations to embrace a new way of delivering IT services during the worst recession in decades. In fact, budget constraints will not stop the trend towards cloud computing – rather, the current financial difficulties in the public sector will accelerate the inevitable adoption of cloud computing. Technology innovations and financial drivers have aligned to push IT organizations rapidly towards a cloud computing model. I see cloud computing as the next logical step in the steady evolution of the distributed IT service model. Cloud computing is neither radical nor new – we can see that the precursors of cloud computing were put in place over the last decade.

Today we’re excited to announce a new edition of Google Apps. Designed with guidance from customers like the federal government, the City of Los Angeles and the City of Orlando, Google Apps for Government includes the same great Google applications that people know and love, with specific measures to address the policy and security needs of the public sector.