Interview

Chris Kemp, CTO, NASA

Look for new NASA websites “where we intend to be transparent on how we do business and what we are working on. It’s going to be like “Gizmodo for space geeks”.

As NASA CTO, Kemp is responsible for NASA’s EA and introducing emerging technologies into NASA’s IT roadmap. He leads the Nebula Cloud Computing Platform program and is responsible for NASA’s contributions to the Open Government Initiative.

Because of NASA’s unique mission, there is a lot of interest in projects that involve public dissemination of data and public web projects.

An example is the World Wide Telescope project (www.worldwidetelescope.org) which used full resolution imagery from the Mars HIRISE orbiter to make the highest resolution Mars surface terrain map ever released. Powered by Nebula, click on Mars and zoom in to see images of unparalleled resolution and a full 3D Mars.

Recently, Kemp talked about Nebula and other Cloud related topics in this On The FrontLines interview.

OTFL: Why has NASA embraced Cloud computing? Is there something special or unique about NASA?

Chris Kemp, NASA: For NASA, there is a mismatch between commercial oriented platforms and the government. One issue is that most commercial platforms require a credit card and it is hard to use government credit cards to buy computer infrastructure. The other issue is security; (that’s why) we are seeing all of these providers work with the FedRAMP process to create a C&A framework.

However, even if security issues and procurement issues with consumer oriented platforms were solved, I would argue that NASA scientists would find the performance/ scale requirements and data locality issues would not be addressed by some of these commercial platforms.

The ‘secret sauce’ was listening to our customers, the end users and scientists; then figuring out what computing experience would make them stop buying a bunch of hardware infrastructure and consider the Cloud.

Since we did it internally we could be an early adopter without having to address some of the security issues because it was all behind our firewall.

Finally, because we are providing it as a shared service, we don’t have to deal with credit card and procurement issues.

OTFL: Are you getting calls from fellow CTOs asking how Nebula is working?

Chris Kemp, NASA: Yes, and I’m really excited about what we have been talking about in the development community.

We are sharing what we are doing. We are contributing our code to open source communities and releasing it under an Apache license. (We are also) finding a way for people who are interested in standing up infrastructures inside their agency or their enterprise to do that without having to actually work with NASA.

NASA is in the business of space exploration. We operate a lot of IT infrastructure to support that mission, but we are not in the business of helping reinvent IT in the US government either.

Recently, we were approached by a consortium called OpenStack. We pulled together a lot of technology including Nebula technology and created an open source Cloud computing service provider platform.

OpenStack consists today of the Nebula computing code and the RACKSPACE file system code. Open source developers are in the process now of integrating that code; in fact anyone, you can today download

OpenStack and get it running; you can run Nebula in your garage if you want to; you can also contribute code back to OpenStack and we will use that in Nebula.

So all of the code that NASA is writing in Nebula is making its way back into OpenStack; and all of the code written by developers for OpenStack is getting looked at by NASA.

There is an opportunity for anyone who is interested in this technology to deploy it and benefit from it and when they make contributions back to that code for NASA to benefit from it as well.

OTFL: What advice would you give agencies about moving into the Cloud?

Chris Kemp, NASA: Any agency that is interested in building a hybrid cloud infrastructure, particularly IaaS or PaaS within their firewalls, I would strongly encourage everyone to consider SaaS first before hosting apps in your Data Centers.

SaaS doesn’t solve your problems but you might be able to build something on your platform. The very last thing you should look at is building IaaS locally. But if for security or performance reasons you have too, it’s much better than having hundreds or thousands of pieces of infrastructure littered around different facilities.

I would encourage you not to contact us, but go to www.openstack.org, download the code, install it, contribute to it because there is a whole community there.

One of the metrics we are proud of is since OpenStack there have been more than 600 developer contributions to the code. NASA has benefited and taxpayers didn’t pay a penny for it.

OTFL: What are some benefits a layperson would see coming from the Cloud?

Chris Kemp, NASA: If you are a taxpayer, more money is going to science and NASA missions and less on IT infrastructure management and operations.

Nebula is on the edge of our network. So a lot of apps will result in interesting web services. Data centric web apps are being developed like the World Wide Telescope.

We worked with OMB on USAspending (www.usaspending.gov). It is powered by Nebula and provides taxpayers visibility into trillions of dollars of federal spending. You are able to drill down; do ad hoc queries and real time graphs.

This would not be possible if you had to make the argument to buy all the infrastructure and then maybe the site doesn’t work. It’s hard to justify buying infrastructure for sites, concepts or research that you aren’t confident you are going to see results.

(The Cloud) is a great place to host public data and provide services that provide the public transparency. If you look at NASAs open government plan, Nebula is a major component because it is a great place to put data. It allows us to solve important problems while we make it the most secure place to do business.

OTFL: How do you spend your time?

Chris Kemp, NASA: I lead three groups. One is EA. While I think classically enterprise architects would come up with the “go to” state; I think of it differently; I see (1) where we are; (2) where we should be; and (3) the future space.

I’m not going to spend my time convincing our CIO to put in VoIP. There are many successful implementations of VoIP. What I’m thinking about is “what’s next”.

I run IT Labs ; our goal is to build case studies for emerging technologies and then help us understand is this something we should be doing now or is it out there; should we revisit in a year or two.

It is important is to scale fast because we don’t want to spend money on three or four projects. We would rather pilot or prototype a hundred projects a year spending as little resources as possible testing them out. We bring all of that to enterprise architect and decide whether this technology could solve this problem or that problem; or it’s not ready yet, because it doesn’t integrate; or users have a hard time using it; or the culture isn’t ready.

Then CIO doesn’t spend time trying implementing emerging technologies that are just going to go nowhere.

OTFL: How you see the Cloud evolving? What excites you?

Chris Kemp, NASA: There is so much exciting going on, but in my crystal ball I do get to cheat a little bit. Unlike a lot of my colleagues, I spend a lot of time with venture capitalists in Silicon Valley. (I see) early stage companies today that haven’t launched their products yet, but the public will become acquainted with in a year or two. Then government contractors will hear about it a year or two after that; and then a year or two after that it is rolled out at NASA.

The best way to be good stewards of the taxpayers money is to really tune into what is coming out of university research; what the VCs are funding; and what they are focused on, for example from Mozilla or Google labs or Microsoft Research.

I think we are trying to get our hands on that technology first and think very carefully about how it could advance our mission. That way it’s not our employees bringing it to us from our CIO shop because we already have it.

We are trying to get out ahead; so we are the smartest guys in the room when comes to IT. That’s what we have been asked to do and we are trying to build a great team to do just that.

Soon, we are launching some new websites where we intend to be transparent on how we do business and talk about what we are working on. It’s going to be like “Gizmodo for space geeks”.