The Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) is currently developing a new cloud service management platform to ease barriers and burdens to services, a top cloud expert at the agency said on Wednesday.
Korie Seville, DISA’s deputy chief technology officer for Compute, said at a March 27 Federal News Network DoD Cloud Exchange event that the agency is developing the OLYMPUS platform to provide a management platform for public cloud users focused on lowering the barriers for entry for getting started in public cloud networks.
“[OLYMPUS] focuses on providing what I call the common services,” Seville said, adding that the platform will have “a lot of the things that you need to stand up an environment, but that aren’t specifically focused to the [cloud] application.”
“These are things like name resolution, certificates, network time. All these things that are often overlooked in [cloud services] deployment, but they’re crucial to getting an application off the ground. They’re there for you,” he said.
OLYMPUS will focus on two core “minimally viable products” — enterprise network connectivity and boundary protection, and common services. The products will be hosted on all four of the cloud service providers under the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability multi-vendor cloud contract program: Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, Google, and Oracle.
Seville explained that DISA’s private cloud users have that management service capability, but public cloud users do not.
OLYMPUS is DISA’s attempt to give public cloud users that same “head start” as private cloud users with a management platform that offers essential services for standing up and using cloud services.
Seville asked attendees to imagine a situation where a writer sitting in front of their computer is staring at a blinking cursor “and how intimidating that can be right to start those first couple of words on paper.
DISA saw this same situation on the public cloud side.
“How in the world can we expect all mission partners across the across our ecosystem to be able to just walk out there and immediately become cloud experts,” Seville said.
“The methodology is to create a managed platform where the customers can just come in and drop their apps and we remove the burden or share the burden of bringing all of those common services up and operational off of the customer,” Seville said. “We are giving you the ability to get started quicker and lowering the barrier for entry for getting started in cloud.”
