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Cloud.gov

cloud.gov

21–30 of 59 posts

Re: Cloud.gov

#21

Considering this is only for FedRAMP Low/Medium, I'm not sure why any contractor or agency would pick this over AWS GovCloud, where finding people already familiar with the platform is easy.

I haven't used AWS's version, but the gov version of Azure is terrible. Missing so many features and limited in so many ways and there are so many "gotchas". And no matter how many times you tell a vendor that's what you have they won't admit their product isn't compatible until the second or third time they try to implement.

Re: Cloud.gov

#23
post #12

The UK equivalent has just announced it’s closing down for many of the reasons people comment here - https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2022/07/12/why-weve-decided-to-decom...

It seems like this product could be better (less risky) as a set of shared config files or something.

Re: Cloud.gov

#24
post #11

As someone who runs 20+ cloud based government applications it is unclear to me how this is easier to secure, more performant, or cheaper than AWS. My first impression is this adds a lot of risks and unknowns in a critical area where there are existing and well-known best practices.

It still is AWS. The AWS GovCloud partition to me more precise. https://cloud.gov/docs/technology/iaas/

I'll have to look closer, if there is cost savings I would consider it. We put a lot of effort into achieving AWS "Well Architected" so I'd hate to end up in a lesser position by going in a potentially lesser known, lesser tested, lesser supported approach.

Re: Cloud.gov

#25

Cloud.gov was really promising when it was announced years ago, but in practice there ended up being so many differing security requirements and security boundary tensions between them and purported customers of them that they didn’t end up having any real impact because while some could use them, many could not, and those who could often found it easier to just not use them. There were also issues getting needed per…

So we need BaaS? Bureaucracy as a service?

FaaF, failure as a feature

Re: Cloud.gov

#26
post #16

Considering this is only for FedRAMP Low/Medium, I'm not sure why any contractor or agency would pick this over AWS GovCloud, where finding people already familiar with the platform is easy.

It’s FedRAMP High: https://cloud.gov/docs/technology/iaas/

Just because you can run High workloads on AWS GovCloud, doesn't mean that Cloud.gov can run High.

From their own front page:

> We’re a great fit when:

> - Your applications are Moderate impact level or lower

Re: Cloud.gov

#27

Considering this is only for FedRAMP Low/Medium, I'm not sure why any contractor or agency would pick this over AWS GovCloud, where finding people already familiar with the platform is easy.

> I'm not sure why any contractor or agency would pick this over AWS GovCloud.

Because (theoretically) faster path to ATO, which is a huge pain in the arse. That's what all these federal private clouds try to accomplish.

Re: Cloud.gov

#29
While in Google's Patent Litigation dep't, I had a case (not a suit) about Google's Gov Cloud product.

Without divulging too many details: the government is quite reasonably a bit sticky about where the data is stored physically.

Re: Cloud.gov

#30
post #7

Good overviews of how it is put together: https://cloud.gov/docs/technology/iaas/ https://cloud.gov/docs/technology/responsibilities/ Using open source Cloud Foundry as the basis. Seems well thought out. However, I wonder if a better approach would be to offer this PaaS but also lower level baselines that make using AWS easier and more secure so it’s not all or nothing to take advantage of their services.

> However, I wonder if a better approach would be to offer this PaaS but also lower level baselines that make using AWS easier and more secure so it’s not all or nothing to take advantage of their services.

That's what I was working on for a little sub-agency.

You have to start somewhere, with a menu of cloud services that you'll offer to anyone who wants to deploy their app for the federal government to use. You can make that menu selection larger or smaller depending on what services are on the approved list.

Platform One, for example, is PaaS built around Kubernetes deployments. Mine was built using a much larger approved list of services (Kubernetes, Fargate, and so on) that an entity could select to deploy their app/service.

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