It’s only a few months old, but the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability is already spurring cloud innovation, say observers watching JWCC closely. The Defense Department awarded JWCC to Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle in December 2022. New offerings include, ironically, cloud capabilities deployed outside of the companies’ own clouds.

“We’re already seeing announcements from the major cloud providers of physical equipment, modular data centers,” said Nic Perez, chief technology officer for cloud at ThunderCat Technology. Speaking at Federal News Network’s DoD Cloud Exchange 2023, Perez called these new products “cloud technologies on premise or cloud technologies in theater.”

Until now, DoD components have had a relatively easy time acquiring and using software as a service, but they’ve had difficulty replicating cloud architectures locally, he said. Now that they can, agencies have greater flexibility in where to locate workloads. By developing applications in a cloud-native way, DoD agencies can better realize the economies of commercial clouds than if they simply lift and shift legacy applications, Perez added.

For mission applications requiring high performance, agencies can acquire their own equipment but house it in a commercial cloud data center in an updated form of colocation too, he pointed out.

“That’s one of the key elements we help customers with,” Perez said. “When you put your equipment in a co-lo, you will be literally a couple of milliseconds away from access to those big cloud providers.”

Putting the focus on the data

Data, data storage and data egress also have a significant impact on strategy for cloud, he said. Yes, cloud storage is cheap, but downloading data from a commercial cloud can get expensive. That’s one reason that many of the 200 or so cloud centers in the Washington, D.C., area also contain DoD co-located gear.

“When you move the data to the cloud, it creates its own kind of eternal gravitational pull, and the application is going to come with it,” Perez said. Storage becomes a matter of balancing the costs of keeping an organization’s own storage systems up to date, so data is available fast for analysis or certain applications.

“But you’ve got to back it up,” he added. “You’re typically going to duplicate the environment. And so you may have your primary be on premises, but you may have your backup, archive and cold storage in the cloud.”

The challenge in figuring out the right mix of on-premise, colocation and commercial cloud lies in knowing what cloud costs will truly be because, Perez noted, it’s relatively easy to calculate the costs of operating government-owned equipment.

“The biggest barrier to entry is procurement and trying to determine what we call nonlabor services,” Perez said. “It’s very difficult for contracting officers and their teams to really accurately determine what that cost is going to be.” He said an agency is one application programming interface away from a sudden change in what had been a predictable cost.

Whatever the costs turn out to be, he added, it’s important to tailor cloud workloads carefully. For example, knowing monthly workload patterns might let the agency shut off a cloud server or pause workload at hours when they’re not in use.

“In the cloud, you can actually configure the system so its compute only runs when there is something to do,” Perez said, “instead of just running something 24/7 — just in case something happens along the way.”

To read or watch other sessions on demand, go to our 2023 DoD Cloud Exchange event page.

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