8 ms·

18F launches cloud.gov

218 points by dlapiduz 11y ago

jstanley 11y ago
For those who don't know: "18F is a digital services agency built on the lean startup model based within the United States federal government." (wikipedia)
- aaronbrethorst 11y ago
  Which is named after their physical location in Washington DC, 18th and F Street.
  - bshimmin 11y ago
    Oh, thank you. I was desperately trying to work out if this was a "A16Z" (Andreessen Horowitz) thing...
    - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
      I spent 15 minutes trying to figure this out the last time they popped up on HN. It's surprising to me how difficult this was to find out. I think it was buried in a FAQ somewhere.
    - ChristianGeek 11y ago
      I thought it was an 18-year-old female and wondered why that was considered worthy of a headline.
    - jdavis703 11y ago
      The thing you're referring to is called a "numeronym."
      - bshimmin 11y ago
        Lovely word. Thank you very much.
  - chrisBob 11y ago
    I always assumed it had some military symbolism. In the Army, all of the Special Forces jobs are 18 series (18A, 18B...).
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  They're also critical for the work the US Digital Service is doing to revamp how technology services are delivered in the federal government. EDIT: USDS/18F folks, you're doing phenomenal work. Thank you.
  - sswezey 11y ago
    What is the difference between the USDS and 18F, it seems like a blurred line.
    - jdmichal 11y ago
      Seems like it's mostly a philosophical difference. Two directions to the same goal. http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...
      - kingkilr 11y ago
        (I work at USDS@VA) I wouldn't say it's a philosophical difference. We're definitely tackling the problem in two different ways, but that's not because either group thinks the other is wrong, it's because this is a big problem that requires attacking it from many angles.
        wslack 11y ago
        <3
    - timdorr 11y ago
      The USDS is part of the White House. They are directly under the President. 18F is basically a contracting agency, run by and for the government. They basically take on work that's assigned to them by the USDS. The USDS does work as well, but typically more with a leadership and policy role.
      - amorphid 11y ago
- Jemmeh 11y ago
  I hope I'm not the only one who thought the headline was someone trying to be hip while saying 18 year old female. (Dr Evil: I'm hip, I'm cool. I'm with it!)
- c3534l 11y ago
  And here I thought an 18-year-old girl eas behind this.
mc32 11y ago
Wonder if this will have long term impact on the likes of amazon's gov cloud. Looks like their tools facilitate their adoption.
- mitchell_h 11y ago
  wondering that too. HP's cloud has a gov wing also.
plonh 11y ago
This is cool, but,...18F are consultants, who pop in, wave a magic wand, and pop out. Many of its employees are.bound by law to a max 2 or 4 year term. Will cloud.gov support its users for 5, 10, 15 years?
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  18F are _not_ consultants. They're federal employees with a term limit who are domain experts. EDIT: See sailfast's comment below. I think we're quibbling over semantics.
  - sailfast 11y ago
    A chunk of 18F are consultants to other government agencies and provide their services to government for a 100% cost-reimbursable fee for specific projects, much like a private consulting firm. https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/ https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-hiring/positions/resource-manager/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-hiring/position...
- spamlord 11y ago
  Most Amazon employees only stick around for 2 years or so, but yet Amazon is still supporting its users.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- azernik 11y ago
  They will maintain it like any company does - hand off support for existing products as employees leave.
- panzagl 11y ago
  The downvoters don't understand how federal contracts work- maintenance will be bid to the usual suspects, with the downward spiral that entails.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
cryowaffle 11y ago
Glad to see the healthcare.gov debacle leading to a positive shift in mentality at .gov.
- Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
  As someone who worked in the Federal sphere, nothing's changed at all. The same procurement rules and regulations remain in place with all the issues they cause. 18F is a nice experiment, and they do have some wins, but they are just a drop in the bucket. The whole procurement and management process is so broken that it's a wonder any project gets completed. The same few bad actors keep winning contracts over and over again, fail, but then don't have any repercussions. In fact, their failures actually net them more money more often than not as contracts get extended now that the contractor has the government by the balls. IMO the best thing the government could do is a massive in-housing of functions. So much infrastructure within the Federal sphere has contractors essentially acting as PMs, the rank and file builders, the maintenance staff, etc., all with many layers of prime contractors and subs stuffed with middlemen. This doesn't go just for IT. Lots of simple functions are outsourced to little benefit. Some of it I think might be because it's hard to fire Federal workers and contractors aren't unionized, but it would be better to fix those issues than hire the same person for twice the salary (when accounting for middlemen, margins, etc.)
  - pc86 11y ago
    I'm inclined to agree, but I have two questions regarding that: 1. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts? 2. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software? Not that #2 isn't possible/likely/a fact under the current system depending on who you speak to.
    - dragonwriter 11y ago
      > 1. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts? Yes. > 2. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software? Assuming that that is the case, the fact that government positions are notoriously underpaid compared to private-sector counterparts would also imply a significant skill deficit in those overseeing and managing government contracts for outsourced work compared to the people employed by the private contractors to exploit the contracting system for maximum profit. So, if we assume that public sector pay deficits mean, on average, public sector skill deficits, then so long as you don't address the pay deficits, you're stuck with either : (1) Government software being substandard quality because its made by people with substandard skill working in government, or (2) Government software being substandard quality because of substandard controls and quality assessment being exercised in the process of contracting out the work to private firms seeking to profit from government contracting process.
chipgap98 11y ago
That gif is really stressing me out for some reason
- zcdziura 11y ago
  Building and launching things (including warships) is a stressful process.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  You should see what happened behind the ship. http://i1.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ku-xlarge.gif http://i1.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ku-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1EDAypi7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1EDAypi7g
- michaelmior 11y ago
  It took me a couple viewings to decide if this was a successful launch or if something went wrong.
  - pimlottc 11y ago
    It is maddening trend, how a few seconds of video is often clipped out of a larger video and inserted, on infinite loop, in another document with no direct reference or explanation.
    - bmogilefsky 11y ago
      Good point... I'll make the GIF a link back to the original YouTube video. EDIT: Which is here, by the way! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q
- jkldotio 11y ago
  One of the strangest things I've run across on Reddit is a group of people with a kind of thalassophobia (fear of the sea) that is focused on man-made things under or partially submerged in water. They call it submechanophobia and share pictures of such things to spook each other out on their subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia).
eonw 11y ago
I think 18F is a great idea and seems to be doing good things, but are there not existing options they can use? Why reinvent the wheel?
- bcjordan 11y ago
  The cloud.gov platform is built on top of existing tooling and platforms (Docker, Cloud Foundry, AWS). It's possible recommendations and documentation for quickly deploying sites and services using these platforms is lacking, or changes too often to be provided as a supported, recommended solution to a large set of small teams.
- tvanantwerp 11y ago
  I saw several people from 18F present at Code for America Summit the other week, and my understanding is that the regulatory overhead involved in launching new government tech services (something like 4000 pages of relevant regulations to comply with) is so large that it's usually a boondoggle. Part of what they are doing is building services with that regulatory compliance built into it, so agencies don't have to slog through all of that for every little thing they want built.
- mbesto 11y ago
  Governance, Risk and Compliance. Even if the private sector does GRC better than the government, they (the gov't) at the very least have control. Not to mention their stack appears to be mostly open source (Docker, CF, etc). This makes total sense and is a "best of both worlds" approach.
wpears 11y ago
The video at the "byzantine regulatory framework" link[1] is worth a watch (at least the first 10 minutes to get a taste). One of the most valuable offerings of cloud.gov is (hopefully) the ease with which it can go through the ATO and FISMA processes because it was designed with them in mind. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4
- sailfast 11y ago
  I'm not sure how this will expedite the ATO process as it uses technology that has not been STIG'd yet and may not have a "by the book" way to sign off (Docker, for instance, can be painful to ATO). EDIT: After viewing Noah's FISMA guidance vid (nice work) there is definitely possibility to expedite but to really grease things you'd want to create a certification arm within GSA that can sign off the risk or perform a "certified" risk assessment on behalf of the customer agency so you could do things your way while still allowing them to sleep at night. Once you get into sensitive data loads and non-public stuff people start to get even more risk averse. / End Edit That said, I'm hopeful that it does pave the way for change because this kind of platform is critical to reducing the barriers to experimentation in government. Perhaps because 18F is committing to supporting / upgrading the platform it will allow Federal CIOs and CISOs to shift some of the risk to 18F and sign the paperwork more quickly.
  - aidanfeldman 11y ago
    Those teams definitely exist in agencies (GSA included), but we (18F) are managing ATOs internally for our projects, and are working on tooling to clarify, simplify, and automate the process. https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/ https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/ is our first project around this.
Yhippa 11y ago
The more I am observing the government I wonder if it will ever be possible for the the 18F treatment to hit the more old traditional Federal Government agencies like CMS. Talk about byzantine regulations.
- aidanfeldman 11y ago
  https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer :-)
  - Yhippa 11y ago
    This. Is. Amazing. Thanks for the link! I am digging this so far.
BinaryIdiot 11y ago
Oh this is interesting. Reminds me of the EzBake platform that's only been briefly talked about (http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/library/presentation/cloudera-federal-forum-2014--ezbake--the-dodiis-app-engine.html http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/librar...). I wonder how many agencies will allow developers to jump into this; seems many of the agencies have a "must be built internally here" attitude about some of this stuff. Still, looks like a good step forward.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
I am really enthusiastic about the potential for building Eco-systems of small developer companies that focus on building the thousands and thousands of package that governments the world over need for their stutory obligations The blueprint for USDS was the UK digital service, this is hitting some issues as they have started a ball rolling but now look like a bottleneck. Some of the "agile" restrictions and some of the centralised nature of development teams are likely to go - but the essence is a fantastic opportunity and landscape ahead (See my site gratuitous I know but http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto)
parasubvert 11y ago
Interesting to see Cloud Foundry take off this year after many years of being more of a curiosity on its own island. I personally didn't get it until I saw Docker a couple of years ago and wondered "how will we operate all of these apps, services or even the servers they run on without playing yet another shell game and resorting back to traditional shit IT?". And that brought me back to Cloud Foundry and BOSH, to the point where I quit my old job and joined Pivotal.
- frabcus 11y ago
  How are you finding Cloud Foundry? Is it good? I've looked quickly at it, but unlike (say) Heroku, found it hard to know where to start to host a simple app.
  - wslack 11y ago
    We have doc stuff here: https://docs.cloud.gov/ https://docs.cloud.gov/
  - parasubvert 11y ago
    Pivotal Web Services - Run.pivotal.io - is the CF equivalent to Heroku. Documentation is at docs.run.pivotal.io. IBM has one at Bluemix.net as well. CF is very good if you want to run a cloud native / 12 factor app. It's also rapidly evolving to run rich workloads (TCP router is coming, .NET is in beta). I would say CF is more flexible at the kinds of apps and services it can run as the buildpacks tend to be more sophisticated forks of the Heroku buildpacks, or new from scratch buildpacks (like PHP, Or Java). Docker images should be hostable in the near future as well. Whereas the service levels and instance sizing flexibility available from Heroku tends to be richer. This is a function of where both companies make their money. Heroku only makes money from their public cloud, whereas Pivotal is focused on selling high end subscriptions for those who want to run their own private CF on Amazon or VMware or OpenStack.
- zaksoup 11y ago
  This is a huge validation of everything we've been saying and working on at Pivotal. In order to be successful at running software at scale you need your operations to get out of your way as a developer, and you need tools and architecture that make being an operator painless. That's the goal with CF and Bosh, and it's clear that it pays off.
Splines 11y ago
> The magic happens when an infrastructure team encapsulates their expertise, and then exposes that expertise as a service which can be used directly by developers. I like this statement - how do you deal with educating team members on areas that require deep expertise? (e.g.., security, accessibility, localization). Do you offer training, brown-bags, educational videos, or do you say "don't worry about it - if you do this in $x way, magic[1] will take care of you". [1] Magic being defined as the compiler, automated tests, etc., feeding into a central feedback system (bugs, tickets, email, or whatever you use) telling you what you did wrong, and hopefully how to fix it.
- bmogilefsky 11y ago
  [Author of the 18F blog post here] Accessibility and L10N are app-level concerns, not something that cloud.gov is going to be able to help with. However, 18F works on other efforts aimed at helping people do those things better, eg https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/ As for security and other devops concerns, which is what cloud.gov is about: This is why we're in a scaling/pilot phase now. A successful PaaS should reduce the depth of expertise needed to do those things right. That said, there are things like awareness of 12factor.net app design principles which are very unevenly distributed in government once you get outside of 18F. We will be concentrating on generating materials and documentation to make learning about those things in the context of cloud.gov as self-service as possible, and expand the pilot outward to those who need help even approaching the concept of a PaaS once we have more of those materials.
dmerrick 11y ago
Slightly off-topic, but the "Butt-to-Butt" browser extension makes this headline quite amusing. [0] http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-plus/...
- degenerate 11y ago
  Looks like the extension doesn't event let you type "cloud" in a text box... it probably changes it before submitting the form. Heh.
lebiru 11y ago
Cool initiative, but companies that have state government as clients would not agree to a federally hosted cloud based service.
- brianpan 11y ago
  I think the potential for cloud.gov is to expand to other federal agencies, not private companies.
  - bmogilefsky 11y ago
    Yes, that is the scope and intent for now, although there is potential for state agencies to make use of it as well.
- aidanfeldman 11y ago
  Correct – this is specifically for use by federal agencies. _Member of 18F._
js2 11y ago
I loathe the politics/bureaucracy of working at large companies, and yet oddly find myself wanting to work for 18F.
- Axsuul 11y ago
  Because of how fast things appear to move at 18F.
- sliverstorm 11y ago
  There are upsides to big companies, and if they can keep the downsides (beuracracy, etc) under control... Once upon a time HP was supposedly a phenomenal place to work.
ceworthington 11y ago
This is awesome work that is going to make it easier for a number of our digital service teams across government to deploy services. [shameless plug to join public service for a year or two] If you're interested in joining 18F or the U.S. Digital Service (which has an HQ office in the White House but also has teams across government), this application works for both teams: https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply
- wslack 11y ago
  <3
dlapiduz 11y ago
If you are interested in contributing to cloud.gov check out all our open source repos: https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/ https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/
motyar 11y ago
You must check http://cloud.gov.in http://cloud.gov.in too

218 points by dlapiduz 11y ago

For those who don't know: "18F is a digital services agency built on the lean startup model based within the United States federal government." (wikipedia)

aaronbrethorst 11y ago
Which is named after their physical location in Washington DC, 18th and F Street.
- bshimmin 11y ago
  Oh, thank you. I was desperately trying to work out if this was a "A16Z" (Andreessen Horowitz) thing...
  - aaronbrethorst 11y ago
    I spent 15 minutes trying to figure this out the last time they popped up on HN. It's surprising to me how difficult this was to find out. I think it was buried in a FAQ somewhere.
  - ChristianGeek 11y ago
    I thought it was an 18-year-old female and wondered why that was considered worthy of a headline.
  - jdavis703 11y ago
    The thing you're referring to is called a "numeronym."
    - bshimmin 11y ago
      Lovely word. Thank you very much.
- chrisBob 11y ago
  I always assumed it had some military symbolism. In the Army, all of the Special Forces jobs are 18 series (18A, 18B...).
toomuchtodo 11y ago
They're also critical for the work the US Digital Service is doing to revamp how technology services are delivered in the federal government. EDIT: USDS/18F folks, you're doing phenomenal work. Thank you.
- sswezey 11y ago
  What is the difference between the USDS and 18F, it seems like a blurred line.
  - jdmichal 11y ago
    Seems like it's mostly a philosophical difference. Two directions to the same goal. http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-and-usds/ http://ben.balter.com/2015/04/22/the-difference-between-18f-...
    - kingkilr 11y ago
      (I work at USDS@VA) I wouldn't say it's a philosophical difference. We're definitely tackling the problem in two different ways, but that's not because either group thinks the other is wrong, it's because this is a big problem that requires attacking it from many angles.
      - wslack 11y ago
        <3
  - timdorr 11y ago
    The USDS is part of the White House. They are directly under the President. 18F is basically a contracting agency, run by and for the government. They basically take on work that's assigned to them by the USDS. The USDS does work as well, but typically more with a leadership and policy role.
    - amorphid 11y ago
Jemmeh 11y ago
I hope I'm not the only one who thought the headline was someone trying to be hip while saying 18 year old female. (Dr Evil: I'm hip, I'm cool. I'm with it!)
c3534l 11y ago
And here I thought an 18-year-old girl eas behind this.

mc32 11y ago

Wonder if this will have long term impact on the likes of amazon's gov cloud. Looks like their tools facilitate their adoption.

mitchell_h 11y ago
wondering that too. HP's cloud has a gov wing also.

plonh 11y ago

This is cool, but,...18F are consultants, who pop in, wave a magic wand, and pop out. Many of its employees are.bound by law to a max 2 or 4 year term. Will cloud.gov support its users for 5, 10, 15 years?

toomuchtodo 11y ago
18F are _not_ consultants. They're federal employees with a term limit who are domain experts. EDIT: See sailfast's comment below. I think we're quibbling over semantics.
- sailfast 11y ago
  A chunk of 18F are consultants to other government agencies and provide their services to government for a 100% cost-reimbursable fee for specific projects, much like a private consulting firm. https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/ https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-hiring/positions/resource-manager/ https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-hiring/position...
spamlord 11y ago
Most Amazon employees only stick around for 2 years or so, but yet Amazon is still supporting its users.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
azernik 11y ago
They will maintain it like any company does - hand off support for existing products as employees leave.
panzagl 11y ago
The downvoters don't understand how federal contracts work- maintenance will be bid to the usual suspects, with the downward spiral that entails.
dragonwriter 11y ago

cryowaffle 11y ago

Glad to see the healthcare.gov debacle leading to a positive shift in mentality at .gov.

Zach_the_Lizard 11y ago
As someone who worked in the Federal sphere, nothing's changed at all. The same procurement rules and regulations remain in place with all the issues they cause. 18F is a nice experiment, and they do have some wins, but they are just a drop in the bucket. The whole procurement and management process is so broken that it's a wonder any project gets completed. The same few bad actors keep winning contracts over and over again, fail, but then don't have any repercussions. In fact, their failures actually net them more money more often than not as contracts get extended now that the contractor has the government by the balls. IMO the best thing the government could do is a massive in-housing of functions. So much infrastructure within the Federal sphere has contractors essentially acting as PMs, the rank and file builders, the maintenance staff, etc., all with many layers of prime contractors and subs stuffed with middlemen. This doesn't go just for IT. Lots of simple functions are outsourced to little benefit. Some of it I think might be because it's hard to fire Federal workers and contractors aren't unionized, but it would be better to fix those issues than hire the same person for twice the salary (when accounting for middlemen, margins, etc.)
- pc86 11y ago
  I'm inclined to agree, but I have two questions regarding that: 1. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts? 2. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software? Not that #2 isn't possible/likely/a fact under the current system depending on who you speak to.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > 1. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their private-sector counterparts? Yes. > 2. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector software? Assuming that that is the case, the fact that government positions are notoriously underpaid compared to private-sector counterparts would also imply a significant skill deficit in those overseeing and managing government contracts for outsourced work compared to the people employed by the private contractors to exploit the contracting system for maximum profit. So, if we assume that public sector pay deficits mean, on average, public sector skill deficits, then so long as you don't address the pay deficits, you're stuck with either : (1) Government software being substandard quality because its made by people with substandard skill working in government, or (2) Government software being substandard quality because of substandard controls and quality assessment being exercised in the process of contracting out the work to private firms seeking to profit from government contracting process.

chipgap98 11y ago

That gif is really stressing me out for some reason

zcdziura 11y ago
Building and launching things (including warships) is a stressful process.
toomuchtodo 11y ago
You should see what happened behind the ship. http://i1.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ku-xlarge.gif http://i1.wp.com/gcaptain.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/ku-... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1EDAypi7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx1EDAypi7g
michaelmior 11y ago
It took me a couple viewings to decide if this was a successful launch or if something went wrong.
- pimlottc 11y ago
  It is maddening trend, how a few seconds of video is often clipped out of a larger video and inserted, on infinite loop, in another document with no direct reference or explanation.
  - bmogilefsky 11y ago
    Good point... I'll make the GIF a link back to the original YouTube video. EDIT: Which is here, by the way! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q
jkldotio 11y ago
One of the strangest things I've run across on Reddit is a group of people with a kind of thalassophobia (fear of the sea) that is focused on man-made things under or partially submerged in water. They call it submechanophobia and share pictures of such things to spook each other out on their subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia https://www.reddit.com/r/submechanophobia).

eonw 11y ago

I think 18F is a great idea and seems to be doing good things, but are there not existing options they can use? Why reinvent the wheel?

bcjordan 11y ago
The cloud.gov platform is built on top of existing tooling and platforms (Docker, Cloud Foundry, AWS). It's possible recommendations and documentation for quickly deploying sites and services using these platforms is lacking, or changes too often to be provided as a supported, recommended solution to a large set of small teams.
tvanantwerp 11y ago
I saw several people from 18F present at Code for America Summit the other week, and my understanding is that the regulatory overhead involved in launching new government tech services (something like 4000 pages of relevant regulations to comply with) is so large that it's usually a boondoggle. Part of what they are doing is building services with that regulatory compliance built into it, so agencies don't have to slog through all of that for every little thing they want built.
mbesto 11y ago
Governance, Risk and Compliance. Even if the private sector does GRC better than the government, they (the gov't) at the very least have control. Not to mention their stack appears to be mostly open source (Docker, CF, etc). This makes total sense and is a "best of both worlds" approach.

wpears 11y ago

The video at the "byzantine regulatory framework" link[1] is worth a watch (at least the first 10 minutes to get a taste). One of the most valuable offerings of cloud.gov is (hopefully) the ease with which it can go through the ATO and FISMA processes because it was designed with them in mind. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4

sailfast 11y ago
I'm not sure how this will expedite the ATO process as it uses technology that has not been STIG'd yet and may not have a "by the book" way to sign off (Docker, for instance, can be painful to ATO). EDIT: After viewing Noah's FISMA guidance vid (nice work) there is definitely possibility to expedite but to really grease things you'd want to create a certification arm within GSA that can sign off the risk or perform a "certified" risk assessment on behalf of the customer agency so you could do things your way while still allowing them to sleep at night. Once you get into sensitive data loads and non-public stuff people start to get even more risk averse. / End Edit That said, I'm hopeful that it does pave the way for change because this kind of platform is critical to reducing the barriers to experimentation in government. Perhaps because 18F is committing to supporting / upgrading the platform it will allow Federal CIOs and CISOs to shift some of the risk to 18F and sign the paperwork more quickly.
- aidanfeldman 11y ago
  Those teams definitely exist in agencies (GSA included), but we (18F) are managing ATOs internally for our projects, and are working on tooling to clarify, simplify, and automate the process. https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/ https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/ is our first project around this.

Yhippa 11y ago

The more I am observing the government I wonder if it will ever be possible for the the 18F treatment to hit the more old traditional Federal Government agencies like CMS. Talk about byzantine regulations.

aidanfeldman 11y ago
https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer :-)
- Yhippa 11y ago
  This. Is. Amazing. Thanks for the link! I am digging this so far.

BinaryIdiot 11y ago

Oh this is interesting. Reminds me of the EzBake platform that's only been briefly talked about (http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/library/presentation/cloudera-federal-forum-2014--ezbake--the-dodiis-app-engine.html http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/librar...). I wonder how many agencies will allow developers to jump into this; seems many of the agencies have a "must be built internally here" attitude about some of this stuff. Still, looks like a good step forward.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

I am really enthusiastic about the potential for building Eco-systems of small developer companies that focus on building the thousands and thousands of package that governments the world over need for their stutory obligations The blueprint for USDS was the UK digital service, this is hitting some issues as they have started a ball rolling but now look like a bottleneck. Some of the "agile" restrictions and some of the centralised nature of development teams are likely to go - but the essence is a fantastic opportunity and landscape ahead (See my site gratuitous I know but http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto)

parasubvert 11y ago

Interesting to see Cloud Foundry take off this year after many years of being more of a curiosity on its own island. I personally didn't get it until I saw Docker a couple of years ago and wondered "how will we operate all of these apps, services or even the servers they run on without playing yet another shell game and resorting back to traditional shit IT?". And that brought me back to Cloud Foundry and BOSH, to the point where I quit my old job and joined Pivotal.

frabcus 11y ago
How are you finding Cloud Foundry? Is it good? I've looked quickly at it, but unlike (say) Heroku, found it hard to know where to start to host a simple app.
- wslack 11y ago
  We have doc stuff here: https://docs.cloud.gov/ https://docs.cloud.gov/
- parasubvert 11y ago
  Pivotal Web Services - Run.pivotal.io - is the CF equivalent to Heroku. Documentation is at docs.run.pivotal.io. IBM has one at Bluemix.net as well. CF is very good if you want to run a cloud native / 12 factor app. It's also rapidly evolving to run rich workloads (TCP router is coming, .NET is in beta). I would say CF is more flexible at the kinds of apps and services it can run as the buildpacks tend to be more sophisticated forks of the Heroku buildpacks, or new from scratch buildpacks (like PHP, Or Java). Docker images should be hostable in the near future as well. Whereas the service levels and instance sizing flexibility available from Heroku tends to be richer. This is a function of where both companies make their money. Heroku only makes money from their public cloud, whereas Pivotal is focused on selling high end subscriptions for those who want to run their own private CF on Amazon or VMware or OpenStack.
zaksoup 11y ago
This is a huge validation of everything we've been saying and working on at Pivotal. In order to be successful at running software at scale you need your operations to get out of your way as a developer, and you need tools and architecture that make being an operator painless. That's the goal with CF and Bosh, and it's clear that it pays off.

Splines 11y ago

> The magic happens when an infrastructure team encapsulates their expertise, and then exposes that expertise as a service which can be used directly by developers. I like this statement - how do you deal with educating team members on areas that require deep expertise? (e.g.., security, accessibility, localization). Do you offer training, brown-bags, educational videos, or do you say "don't worry about it - if you do this in $x way, magic[1] will take care of you". [1] Magic being defined as the compiler, automated tests, etc., feeding into a central feedback system (bugs, tickets, email, or whatever you use) telling you what you did wrong, and hopefully how to fix it.

bmogilefsky 11y ago
[Author of the 18F blog post here] Accessibility and L10N are app-level concerns, not something that cloud.gov is going to be able to help with. However, 18F works on other efforts aimed at helping people do those things better, eg https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/ https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/ As for security and other devops concerns, which is what cloud.gov is about: This is why we're in a scaling/pilot phase now. A successful PaaS should reduce the depth of expertise needed to do those things right. That said, there are things like awareness of 12factor.net app design principles which are very unevenly distributed in government once you get outside of 18F. We will be concentrating on generating materials and documentation to make learning about those things in the context of cloud.gov as self-service as possible, and expand the pilot outward to those who need help even approaching the concept of a PaaS once we have more of those materials.

dmerrick 11y ago

Slightly off-topic, but the "Butt-to-Butt" browser extension makes this headline quite amusing. [0] http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png [1] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-plus/...

degenerate 11y ago
Looks like the extension doesn't event let you type "cloud" in a text box... it probably changes it before submitting the form. Heh.

lebiru 11y ago

Cool initiative, but companies that have state government as clients would not agree to a federally hosted cloud based service.

brianpan 11y ago
I think the potential for cloud.gov is to expand to other federal agencies, not private companies.
- bmogilefsky 11y ago
  Yes, that is the scope and intent for now, although there is potential for state agencies to make use of it as well.
aidanfeldman 11y ago
Correct – this is specifically for use by federal agencies. _Member of 18F._

js2 11y ago

I loathe the politics/bureaucracy of working at large companies, and yet oddly find myself wanting to work for 18F.

Axsuul 11y ago
Because of how fast things appear to move at 18F.
sliverstorm 11y ago
There are upsides to big companies, and if they can keep the downsides (beuracracy, etc) under control... Once upon a time HP was supposedly a phenomenal place to work.

ceworthington 11y ago

This is awesome work that is going to make it easier for a number of our digital service teams across government to deploy services. [shameless plug to join public service for a year or two] If you're interested in joining 18F or the U.S. Digital Service (which has an HQ office in the White House but also has teams across government), this application works for both teams: https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply

wslack 11y ago
<3

dlapiduz 11y ago

If you are interested in contributing to cloud.gov check out all our open source repos: https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/ https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/

motyar 11y ago

You must check http://cloud.gov.in http://cloud.gov.in too