DISA to deliver minimum viable product for Olympus in September

The Defense Information Systems Agency is wrapping up the development phase of its latest cloud offering called DoD Olympus. The agency is on track to reach the minimum viable product by the end of September, paving the way for initial pilot testing.

The Olympus effort, only a couple of months old, is designed to make it easier for DISA’s customers to deploy commercial cloud solutions. It will provide two core services — essential services that any cloud environment requires to operate successfully and the management of those environments.

“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 DNS, DNS caching, Network Time Protocol — all those kinds of core services that really set an environment ready to go so you can deploy onto it. The second level of that is going to be a managed service. So, DISA J9 Hosting and Compute will be able to manage that entire environment for you,” DISA’s J9 Acting Director Jeff Marshall said during the Defense One event on Tuesday.

“As we get further out and as we get better at things like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud, we’re going to be able to use DoD Olympus to actually move your things around for mission partners,” Marshall said. “We’re going to be able to move their OSS around to different segments, whether it’s from a public cloud to a private cloud or from one CSP to another in a multi-cloud environment, depending on what the mission is and what the impact is.”

Since its establishment, J9 has been building its portfolio around tools and services that accelerate cloud adoption. DoD Cloud IaC, for example, is a product offering that allows users to quickly build secure environments in commercial clouds through infrastructure as code. DoD Olympus builds upon what is available through DoD Cloud IaC but takes it further and ensures those environments are not only secure but also managed. There are various levels of management available in those environments as well.

“New to commercial cloud and you want to get started? DoD Cloud IaC. You want to take it a step further and say, ‘DISA, can you manage my environment for me? I only want you to manage a little bit’ — we have a level of Olympus for that. Suppose you want us to manage all of it. In that case, we have a deeper level of Olympus, where we can come in and bring those guardrails, bring that management, bring that security posture,” Jon Williams, DISA OCONUS Cloud Portfolio Manager, said at the AFCEA TechNet Cyber in June.

Leslie Benito, the chief of the product management office for DISA’s J9, told reporters in June that his team is working through the selection of capabilities they want to include in Olympus.

“What are the services that really make the most sense? Obviously, we’re agile, so we will iterate. Where we start won’t be where we end up, at the end of the day. It’s just the team is working to get the pilot ready. We hope to have it by September to start bringing folks on board. We’ve already got a few organizations that are interested,” Benito said.

Olympus will be deployed across the four major commercial cloud service providers — Google, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft and Oracle. The agency’s focus now is on ensuring interconnectivity between commercial and private clouds.

“At the end of the day, we strive to be the preferred hybrid cloud provider for the Defense Department,” Benito said.

As a service-agnostic platform, Olympus can integrate with different tools and systems, including DISA’s Vulcan — a set of tools that allows DISA’s customers to set up their own DevSecOps pipeline.

DISA’s customers use Vulcan for various purposes — tools like JIRA and Confluence manage projects, and Git is used on the back end. Marshall said Git is planning to add AI services to its platform, which will provide additional value to its users.

“I think in the near future, we’re going to be able to offer it as a solution set for even more because Git is about to add AI services into it, and so mission partners are going to be able to utilize it to actually get the value out of AI as part of their software factory development cycle,” Marshall said.

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