Application and infrastructure modernizing has started to take an all-of-the-above approach for where to operate — commercial clouds, data centers and edge computers. The cloud first idea has given way to optimizing hybrid infrastructures for mission requirements.

“We’re seeing a big shift away from the cloud all of a sudden,” said Brandon Gulla, the chief technology officer of Rancher Government Solutions. It’s not that cloud computing doesn’t continue to provide tangible bets, but rather that in modernizing applications, agencies are balancing their approaches.

One reason, Gulla said, stems from artificial intelligence and a desire to move data to where AI applications execute.

5G wireless circuits have “provided a great opportunity for the data to bounce back and forth from the edge to the traditional cloud faster. And that’s providing a lot of opportunity for our government customers,” Gulla said.

For example, military operators seeking speedy decision-making often want data and applications housed locally.

“That’s where edge computing really comes into play,” Gulla said. “It allows them to have sensors and the processing localized to their environment, and be able to have those decisions faster without that reliance on the [cloud] platform.” He said such applications should work even in air-gapped or intermittent connectivity situations.

A diversification of computing environments also lowers risk by providing redundancy and fault tolerance.

“This is a way for them to mitigate risk while modernizing their platform,” he said.

This compute-anywhere presupposes that the elastic, service-rich commercial cloud environment can replicate at the edge or in the agency data center, noted Tricia Fitzmaurice, Rancher Government Solutions public sector vice president of sales.

In recent months, she said, “we saw our customers, with the advancements in small form factor hardware, wanting to process their data where mission was actually happening.”

She added, “We looked at that and said, ok, we need our solutions to be able to deploy out at the edge in the same way that they would perform out in the data center.” Fitzmaurice said that agency tech staffs also want “single pane of glass” management of workloads, regardless of where the workloads are executing.  

Technical diversity

Fitzmaurice and Gulla said that, in addition to locational flexibility, agencies need flexibility in the way they design or refactor applications. Gulla said that sticking to standards and open source software can simplify the choice of technology for a given use case. He said some organizations that bet heavily on a proprietary virtual machine hypervisor and one commercial cloud computing provider later find they must deal with technical debt as technology evolves.

“We want to promote organizations to be willing to adopt open standards such as Kubernetes or Linux containers,” Gulla said, “and actually be able to lift and shift these applications and their IT modernization across infrastructures, no matter if it’s public cloud, private cloud or on premises.” Otherwise, he said, “the technical debt involved with reverse engineering and changing from one hyper scaler to another is massive.”

Gulla said that flexibility can extend even to multiple CPU architectures, noting the emergence of low-power mobile device chips moving into servers. He noted the Navy, constrained by available power on ships, is turning to hardware that uses Arm 64-bit hardware.

Open source containerization also can potentially cut the time to deploy new code.

“A line of code today will take six months to get into the warfighters’ hands,” Gulla said. “That’s too long.” He said the government, using containerization technology “has started to focus on inheritable security patterns and security controls, and concepts such as continuous authority to operate.” He called that capability “an express lane” to get modernized applications into production.

Consistent security must underlie any modernization, Gulla and Fitzmaurice said, hence the importance of inheritable or reusable security mechanisms.

“As signers of the [Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency] secure-by-design pledge,” Fitzmaurice said, “we wanted to ensure that our entire product set adheres to Executive Order 14028,” referring to the Biden administration 2021 initiative.

Gulla added, “We’re trying to ship the software in a secure state. That’s alleviating responsibility from that operator, from that IT staff.” In military settings, “we’re seeing that our warfighters are being asked to do too much these days. By making [security] the responsibility of our team, not only are we delivering secure software, we’re also alleviating those responsibilities and getting code into the warfighter and operators’ hands faster.”

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