4 ms·

> Are there any other cloud providers who have started by reselling another cloud providers products? For government, yes. The USAF has a common infrastructure

> Are there any other cloud providers who have started by reselling another cloud providers products? For government, yes. The USAF has a common infrastructure provider called Cloud One, built on top of AWS GovCloud. You can try to go to their website at https://aws.cdl.af.mil https://aws.cdl.af.mil, but you won't be able to, since it requires a CAC and mutual TLS. Among the things it gives you on top of AWS: - CAC authentication, so MFA isn't optional like with vanilla AWS and you don't need separate IAM for human users (at least not the "I") since every user already has an externally provisioned and managed identity - Air Force managed firewalls, so you can't just choose to be completely open, which vanilla AWS is perfectly happy to allow - A limited subset of AMIs and managed services that are pre-approved as being sufficiently mature and secure for DoD production use - Only pre-approved roles and policies, i.e. you can't accidentally create a publicly accessible S3 bucket because the system won't even allow that as an option And yes, there are economies of scale and volume discounts and what not that have allowed some DoD infrastructure and platform providers to operate without any appropriated spending at least for some period of time, as in they fund themselves entirely by charging other government programs that use them. Platform One was like that I think for at least the first 18 months it existed, but then eventually received its own direct funding.

nonameiguess 5y ago
Also, there are some instances of the government building its own data centers. Raytheon used to own the computing infrastructure for basically the entire NRO, and had their own commercial cloud offering built on top of OpenStack they called "EVE" but it never ended up being used outside of this single client and has since been effectively abandoned going forward now that C2S exists using AWS in classified data centers run by Amazon. There is still a limited subset of NRO programs using something called the "AUE" or Agency Unique Equipment, however, which is another Raytheon contract called Palinode, and this serves applications with extremely specific hardware needs that Amazon can't currently meet, i.e. FPGAs, ASICs, non x86/ARM architectures, bare metal clusters with guaranteed not-shared Infiniband SANs, but it will probably one day go away when commercial cloud providers are eventually able to do that, too.

nonameiguess 5y ago

Also, there are some instances of the government building its own data centers. Raytheon used to own the computing infrastructure for basically the entire NRO, and had their own commercial cloud offering built on top of OpenStack they called "EVE" but it never ended up being used outside of this single client and has since been effectively abandoned going forward now that C2S exists using AWS in classified data centers run by Amazon. There is still a limited subset of NRO programs using something called the "AUE" or Agency Unique Equipment, however, which is another Raytheon contract called Palinode, and this serves applications with extremely specific hardware needs that Amazon can't currently meet, i.e. FPGAs, ASICs, non x86/ARM architectures, bare metal clusters with guaranteed not-shared Infiniband SANs, but it will probably one day go away when commercial cloud providers are eventually able to do that, too.