Did NASA Abandon OpenStack for Amazon?


Did NASA Abandon OpenStack for Amazon?

Bangalore: NASA always has been the epitome in ideas. But a recent blog post by NASA CIO Linda Cuerton has simply caught people with surprise. The blog was about the involvement of enterprise IT in U.S Space agency.

Her blog mentioned some of the major projects that they are thinking to merge with cloud project, including an assignment at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. As an initiative they have already uploaded 250,000 photos of planet Mars onto the Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, Windows Azure. This move heated NASA’s thoughts on cloud computing as it served more than 2.5 million data queries. Cuerton blogged “proving that the cloud can be a terrific way to reach and engage the public,” seemingly impressed on the feedback.

But what surprised everyone was NASA’s support to Amazon web services. NASA didn’t mention anything about OpenStack which actually was a co related project by NASA and Rackspace. OpenStack is now considered as the alternative to Amazon Web Services by all the tech giants.

Cuerton said “NASA shifted to a new web services model that uses Amazon Web Services for cloud-based enterprise infrastructure. This cloud-based model supports a wide variety of web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based, and secure environment while providing almost a million dollars in cost savings each year.”

 What Cuerton blogged has made critics to think twice on NASA’s collaborators. Some of them report that NASA is thinking about a makeover in technology partners. Some believe that NASA still prefers OpenStack.