

Government Moves recovery.gov to the Cloud to Save Money - maukdaddy
http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/05/13/moving-cloud

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jrnkntl
One of the clearest explanations of cloud computing for the uninitiated I have
seen so far:

"There was a time when every household, town, or village had its own water
well. Today, shared public utilities give us access to clean water by simply
turning on the tap. Cloud computing works a lot like our shared public
utilities. However, instead of water coming from a tap, users access computing
power from a pool of shared resources. Just like the tap in your kitchen,
cloud computing services can be turned on or off as needed, and, when the tap
isn’t on, not only can the water be used by someone else, but you aren’t
paying for resources that you don’t use. Cloud computing is a new model for
delivering computing resources – such as networks, servers, storage, or
software applications."

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lallysingh
.. sorry, how do you deliver networks over the cloud? Do they mean content
distribution networks?

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stanleydrew
The cloud provides the network for you. Admittedly the network has been slow
to move itself into the "aaS" crowd since we haven't quite figured out yet how
to provide a Newtork as a Service. But for the purposes of a layman's
description of cloud computing, the cloud takes care of the networking for
you.

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macrael
I'm a little confused as to what has actually changed here. Did they just stop
running things off their own machines and start paying someone else to host
the site?

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smhinsey
It's now on EC2.

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lenni
Is the US government really the world's 'largest consumer of information
technology'?

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ry0ohki
as a former government employee, I can almost guarantee this is true if the
measurement is in money spent.

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joubert
do they say which cloud?

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akgerber
$ ping recovery.gov PING recovery.gov (64.14.118.222)

$ whois 64.14.118.222 OrgName: Savvis

Answer: [http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-
services/Cloud/Pa...](http://www.savvis.net/en-US/infrastructure-
services/Cloud/Pages/Home.aspx)

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percept
[http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id...](http://www.savvis.net/_layouts/SavvisUtilities/Video.aspx?id=9acf6628-86e7-4e78-88db-
ca68b8636d6d&item=1)

Reminds me of those Ruby guys.

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gojomo
But saving money won't create as many jawbs!

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rdtsc
Did anyone read that metaphorically as 'US recovery has moved to the clouds
and became an un-attainable dream' ?

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lanstein
No.

