We have been working hard to build a cloud infrastructure to meet the needs of NASA's scientists. Chief among our concerns is making the cloud adaptable; it must be usable for a wide range of scientific missions with requirements that may change throughout the lifespan of research, data collection, and data processing. Adaptability should also be at the core of our cloud fabric controller.
Nebula recently reached a critical milestone. In addition to supporting our scientists, the core technology we developed for NASA's Nebula cloud computing platform has been selected as a contributor for OpenStack, a newly-launched open source cloud computing initiative. This will allow others outside of the NASA community the opportunity to benefit from our efforts. This is of huge benefit to us as it not only validates our work and our design decisions, but also allows us to interact and work with a larger community to build out new functionality and drive the technology forward at a faster pace. We must remain adaptable inside of NASA to be able to overcome mission changes, changing regulations, and diverse needs from a plethora of scientists that collect, store, and compute in a variety of ways.
Outside NASA, our platform must be adaptable to be of use to other entities that don't have the same needs we have, and will have to change parts of the stack to be able to run without their organization and comply with their guidelines and use cases. The fact that our platform is scalable, robust, and sufficiently fluid can be used by the large community of cloud implementers validates the methodology used when building Nebula.
As we move forward we will be engage with the community in a way that allows sharing and collaboration at all levels. The amount of flexibility OpenStack provides and the desire of the community to be able to implement solutions on top of OpenStack means that we will be moving forward at a very rapid pace. We are committed to continuing to develop the platform in the open, where we can engage with subject matter experts and derive the most value for our scientists.
We will continue sharing our work to enable NASA innovation for the greater good of the community. In the coming weeks we will use this blog to take a closer look OpenStack, the technologies that power it, and the community that is developing around it.
