I've been asked several times to help agencies evaluate their readiness to build a private cloud. Time and time again, I use the same concepts to find their current levels and what they should be looking at next. Data center automation, service oriented infrastructure, IT service management, resource orchestration, standard operating environments. Why am I bringing up ancient buzzwords in a private cloud conversation? Because without these fundamentals, your private cloud won't get very far off the ground. An Amazon AWS VP has been quoted saying "If you are buying hardware, it isn't cloud". You may think, "Well of course, that's their business model. They don't want me to buy a private cloud." The argument made isn't a business model, it is architecture and use case. The economies of scale that need to be achieved in order to validate a cloud model only make sense in large deployments. The benefits of the IT department are best realized when the shift from capital to operational expenditures is complete. A set of local resources that takes advantage of the new cloud focused toolsets to move in a service oriented direction may not be a private cloud, but it is still a valuable direction for those IT shops that need to retain in house capabilities.

Red Hat announced two new cloud offerings at their Summit in Boston, OpenShift and CloudForms. The OpenShift PaaS offering is aimed at developers who want a quick and easy way to deploy apps into an existing IaaS environment. That is a key differentiator here, existing IaaS environments. OpenShift does have a 'locally' hosted PaaS flavor called Express. This is for quick and dirty, not very scalable apps. Using the distributed revision control system, git, a devvie can push a webapp up to the PaaS environment and get a URL for the running app. It is possible to deploy simple apps with PHP, Python and Ruby support available. With no access to database software, you can still install apps like Drupal or MediaWiki. There are no promises here, so make no demands. This is designed for quick prototyping and light use. If you want more features or control, there's Flex and Power.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has released a draft request for quotation (RFQ), HSHQDC-11-Q-00173, supporting the update and overhaul of DHS’s public web properties. In order to consolidate and update these properties, DHS is competeing this requirement among the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) public cloud blanket purchase agreement (BPA) holders on General Service Administration’s (GSA) apps.gov portal. DHS is looking to the cloud providers to deliver the development, staging, and production web environments… but there’s a catch. The production environment cannot go live until they have both the GSA Authority to Operate (ATO) and the Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program (FedRAMP) Joint Authorization Board (JAB) ATO. This is particularly challenging since the FedRAMP isn’t quite ready for primetime. The good news is that the awardee will have 120 days to become compliant once the FedRAMP has officially been released.

This week DLT Solutions announced the formation of the Cloud Advisory Group (CAG). This specialty-based knowledge practice is designed specifically to help our customers understand what cloud technologies are available and how best to leverage that technology. Cloud Computing is a hot topic today, and as such, there’s no shortage of people who are putting their own spin on it. Fortunately, the folks over at the National Institute of Standard and Technology (NIST) have done a good job of providing the baseline by crafting a definition of cloud computing as well as version 1.0 of a cloud Reference Architecture. Fortunately, it looks like most of the journalists and consultants have adopted this definition, and this makes it easier for all of us to start the conversation.

The Federal CIO office recently published this video to help explain cloud computing from a government perspective:

(This is Part 2 of Matt’s series. To read part one, click here.) If SOA is intended to build a distributed application environment whose data sources are far from the end user with processing somewhere in between, then the next logical step is extending that processing onto a cloud resource. In fact, the Ocean Observatory Initiative is already leveraging current commercial cloud providers within their distributed framework. SOA and MOM (message oriented middleware) are two of the key paradigms used in the design of the OOI Cyber Infrastructure. While this architecture incorporates cloud resources as a component of the overall distributed application, similar approaches can be used to migrate resources from local systems to a cloud provider.

The following is a transcription of the Best Practices for Achieving Migration to a Cloud Model webcast that was held on February 23, 2011 and hosted by i360Gov.com. You may also view the archived version by registering online. Moderator: Good afternoon, and welcome to today's webinar, Best Practices for Achieving Migration to a Cloud Model, brought to you by i360.gov, DLT Solutions, Red Hat and NetApp. We have a great line-up of speakers today. Our first speaker is Van Ristau, he's Chief Technology Officer with DLT Solutions. Our second speaker today is Dawn Leaf, NIST Senior Executive for Cloud Computing, Senior Advisor Information Lab at NIST. Our third speaker is Greg Potter, Research Analyst In-Stat. Before we get started, I just want to go over a few housekeeping items. Anytime during the next hour, if you'd like to submit a question, just look for the "Ask a Question" console, and we'll field your questions at the end of the presentation. If you have any technical difficulties during the webinar, click on the "Help" button located below the slide window, and you'll receive technical assistance. And finally, after the session is complete, we'll be emailing you a link to the archived version of this webinar, so you can view it again or share it with a colleague. And now, I'd like to hand it over to Van Ristau – Van.

Are you tired of having multiple versions of the same document so that you can collaborate with co-workers? According to a new article by Federal Times, “Vendors Make Information Sharing Easier by Giving End Users More Control,” government agencies are adopting records sharing systems to help alleviate the pain of multiple versions of the same document and the inability to share and collaborate on documents with multiple users.

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.