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Government Moves recovery.gov to the Cloud to Save Money

34 points by maukdaddy 16y ago

jrnkntl 16y ago
One of the clearest explanations of cloud computing for the uninitiated I have seen so far: "There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."
- lallysingh 16y ago
  .. sorry, how do you deliver networks over the cloud? Do they mean content distribution networks?
  - stanleydrew 16y ago
    The cloud provides the network for you. Admittedly the network has been slow to move itself into the "aaS" crowd since we haven't quite figured out yet how to provide a Newtork as a Service. But for the purposes of a layman's description of cloud computing, the cloud takes care of the networking for you.
joubert 16y ago
do they say which cloud?
- akgerber 16y ago
  $ ping recovery.gov PING recovery.gov (64.14.118.222) $ whois 64.14.118.222 OrgName: Savvis Answer: http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-services/Cloud/Pages/Home.aspx http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-services/Cloud/Pa...
  - percept 16y ago
    http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id=9acf6628-86e7-4e78-88db-ca68b8636d6d&item=1 http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id... Reminds me of those Ruby guys.
- smhinsey 16y ago
  I actually work for the company who did a lot of the original work for recovery.gov and carried out the transition of the production environment to the cloud. I am not exactly sure why it's still resolving to Saavis as another reply points out, but it's probably some sort of DNS TTL issue. Recovery.gov is hosted on Amazon EC2.
rdtsc 16y ago
Did anyone read that metaphorically as 'US recovery has moved to the clouds and became an un-attainable dream' ?
- lanstein 16y ago
  No.
gojomo 16y ago
But saving money won't create as many jawbs!
macrael 16y ago
I'm a little confused as to what has actually changed here. Did they just stop running things off their own machines and start paying someone else to host the site?
- smhinsey 16y ago
  It's now on EC2.
lenni 16y ago
Is the US government really the world's 'largest consumer of information technology'?
- ry0ohki 16y ago
  as a former government employee, I can almost guarantee this is true if the measurement is in money spent.

34 points by maukdaddy 16y ago

One of the clearest explanations of cloud computing for the uninitiated I have seen so far: "There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen, cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or software applications."

lallysingh 16y ago
.. sorry, how do you deliver networks over the cloud? Do they mean content distribution networks?
- stanleydrew 16y ago
  The cloud provides the network for you. Admittedly the network has been slow to move itself into the "aaS" crowd since we haven't quite figured out yet how to provide a Newtork as a Service. But for the purposes of a layman's description of cloud computing, the cloud takes care of the networking for you.

joubert 16y ago

do they say which cloud?

akgerber 16y ago
$ ping recovery.gov PING recovery.gov (64.14.118.222) $ whois 64.14.118.222 OrgName: Savvis Answer: http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-services/Cloud/Pages/Home.aspx http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-services/Cloud/Pa...
- percept 16y ago
  http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id=9acf6628-86e7-4e78-88db-ca68b8636d6d&item=1 http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id... Reminds me of those Ruby guys.
smhinsey 16y ago
I actually work for the company who did a lot of the original work for recovery.gov and carried out the transition of the production environment to the cloud. I am not exactly sure why it's still resolving to Saavis as another reply points out, but it's probably some sort of DNS TTL issue. Recovery.gov is hosted on Amazon EC2.

rdtsc 16y ago

Did anyone read that metaphorically as 'US recovery has moved to the clouds and became an un-attainable dream' ?

lanstein 16y ago
No.

gojomo 16y ago

But saving money won't create as many jawbs!

macrael 16y ago

I'm a little confused as to what has actually changed here. Did they just stop running things off their own machines and start paying someone else to host the site?

smhinsey 16y ago
It's now on EC2.

lenni 16y ago

Is the US government really the world's 'largest consumer of information technology'?

ry0ohki 16y ago
as a former government employee, I can almost guarantee this is true if the measurement is in money spent.