How The Feds Drive Cloud Innovation
October 26, 2012
Grazed from InformationWeek. Author: John Foley.
The coolest cloud computing application in the world — and in our solar system — comes from NASA. The space agency is using commercial cloud services to process the digital images being transmitted to Earth from the Curiosity rover as it searches for signs of life on Mars.
Those images, taken by 17 cameras mounted to the six-wheel, SUV-like rover, are an incredible scientific trove, stored and managed by Amazon Web Services. The most recent images show the rover’s robotic arm taking the first scoops of Martian soil for analysis…
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab is using a variety of Amazon services — EC2, S3, SimpleDB, Route 53, CloudFront, Relational Database Service, Simple Workflow, CloudFormation, Elastic Load Balancing–to make this happen. And the images are available not just to NASA scientists, but to you and me as well. "The public gets access as soon as we have access," says Khawaja Shams, manager of data services at JPL.
Shams was a featured speaker at InformationWeek Government’s GovCloud 2012 conference in Washington, D.C., on Oct. 17, where tech leaders from a dozen federal agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, and the Defense Information Systems Agency, gave updates on their cloud initiatives…
Read more from the source @ http://www.informationweek.com/government/cloud-saas/how-the-feds-drive-cloud-innovation/240010563