The Pentagon’s IT agency looks to expand cloud offshore

The Defense Information Systems Agency is updating its private cloud offerings to provide better data access in the Indo-Pacific and Europe, a defense tech official said. 

“We've been pushing public cloud, so everyone is going [to] public cloud first, and that's fine. That's given us an opportunity to look at what we're offering as our private cloud solution with Stratus,” Jeff Marshall, DISA’s acting director for its Hosting and Compute Center, said Tuesday during the Defense One Cloud Workshop. 

The Pentagon has spent nearly $1 billion for cloud services so far through its biggest public cloud offering, the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability, known as JWCC, according to a recent DOD publication on its innovation efforts. But DISA is still working on a prototype for its private cloud offering, Stratus, that will make it easier to adopt and use on a large scale—similar to a public cloud but with boundaries and “white-glove service.”

“It's going to be able to give us the ability—within the next year or two—to be able to offer [the] same set of parameters” as JWCC, Marshall said. 

The updated Stratus will have “scalability, elasticity, and metering within that. So we're there, we're moving into that space, and we're now starting to use the hybrid cloud broker office to go out to mission partners and get that demand signal to try and understand: what do you have out there, and is it where it should be?” he said. “Let us help you figure that out. Let's help you determine the metrics around that, and then when it's ready, we can bring [in] the workloads that probably should be in a private environment for reasons.”

In the defense space, the best cases for private clouds are those that require a lot of computing power, like a huge database that requires a lot of activity, customer support, and infrastructure.

“While JWCC offers those things within the contracts, sometimes mission partners realize that they get very expensive very quickly, beyond what they're willing to pay for. And in those cases, we can generally offer that at a bit better discount for the big items,” he said. 

Stratus, which has been used in Hawaii, is part of a bigger effort to provide cloud services outside of the continental U.S. The private cloud offering is also being set up in Europe, Marshall said. 

Network connectivity can be slow or inconsistent outside the mainland, which means it can take longer to send important mission data to the right people.

“And when you're talking about mission partners with mission critical activities going on in the Pacific or in Europe, you really can't have those performance degradations. So what these products allow the mission partners to do is actually host their most critical applications closer to them, [with] less latency,” Marshall said. 

To help with that, DISA has a public cloud complement to Stratus called Joint Operational Edge, or JOE, which is also set up in Hawaii and uses the JWCC contract. Each of those cloud vendors—Google, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, and Oracle—will be hooked into JOE.

“It's in the process of getting prototype workloads on it…one is going into Japan, and then we're also deploying it right now and getting it set up for mission partner prototyping in Europe, out of Germany,” Marshall said. Those mission-critical workloads that work best in a cloud environment will then get pushed “out to those nodes, and then the mission partners will be able to utilize that data quicker,” he said. 

Tweaking tools for faster data access

The defense IT agency also has a nascent program called DOD Olympus, which allows smaller teams to launch cloud environments as needed. 

“We heard that mission partners were really looking for a set of tools that allow them to actually start to get an [operating system] put onto a cloud system, and be able to start at applying their applications on top of that, and really get after what they're looking for, for their mission,” Marshall said. 

DOD Olympus is still in the pilot phase, which works in two levels, he said. 

“The first level is going to basically allow DOD Olympus to get all of the core services that a cloud environment requires, whether it's [domain name system, or] DNS, DNS caching, network time protocol—all those  core services that really sets an environment ready to go so you can deploy onto it,” he said. 

“The second level of that, it's going to be a managed service. So DISA J9 Hosting and Compute will actually be able to manage that entire environment for you. And then the future vision of all that is, is, as we get further out, and as we get better at things like hybrid cloud, multi cloud, we're going to be able to use DOD Olympus to actually move your things around for mission partners, we're going to be able to move their OSes around to different segments, whether it's from a public cloud to a private cloud, or whether it's from one [cloud service provider] to another in a multi-cloud environment, depending on what the mission is.”

A minimally viable product for the DOD Olympus platform is expected by the end of fiscal 2024 and, ideally, will help offices figure out what they need.

“It just pulls all those threads together on the provisional services that can be offered right out the gate and applied to someone's cloud environment,” Marshall said. 

DISA is also planning to soon add AI services to its software development tool suite called Vulcan. Marshall didn’t provide a potential date of release.