Hello, Nebula
A government cloud from NASA is exciting
Nebula is a cloud computing platform for the federal government. There are many reasons why the government having a cloud is a good thing, and why it is good that NASA is taking the lead. Having a cloud computing platform for government agencies will lower the cost, in time and in money, of implementing President Obama's push for transparent, collaborative government, which began his first day in office. NASA is perfectly poised to take the lead on a could because it is geographically distributed, has experience dealing with large computing resources, and will generate lots of data and have lots of uses to prove out the cloud infrastructure.
The benefits of working on Nebula
I love this gig. I love it because I get to work on something that will serve millions of people. I get to work with other intelligent, hardworking people. While most people worry about how to scale their single website, we get to work on scaling them all. Most importantly to me, we're building a platform for transparent government. It has been said that "Information is the currency of democracy," and working on the platform to deliver the massive amounts of data the government produces makes me happy.
It isn't just the government that is being opened. We're using and building our own Open Source Software. The first example of our software being released is the cloud fabric controller Nova, available via Github. You can learn more about Nova at Novacc.org. As we continue to improve our offering we will continue to publish code. We are eating our own dogfood, using opensource liberally throughout our infrastructure, and are dedicated to contributing our changes to any other software we modify.