
18F launches cloud.gov - dlapiduz
https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/10/09/cloud-gov-launch/
======
jstanley
For those who don't know: "18F is a digital services agency built on the lean
startup model based within the United States federal government." (wikipedia)

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aaronbrethorst
Which is named after their physical location in Washington DC, 18th and F
Street.

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bshimmin
Oh, thank you. I was desperately trying to work out if this was a "A16Z"
(Andreessen Horowitz) thing...

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jdavis703
The thing you're referring to is called a "numeronym."

~~~
bshimmin
Lovely word. Thank you very much.

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parasubvert
Interesting to see Cloud Foundry take off this year after many years of being
more of a curiosity on its own island.

I personally didn't get it until I saw Docker a couple of years ago and
wondered "how will we operate all of these apps, services or even the servers
they run on without playing yet another shell game and resorting back to
traditional shit IT?". And that brought me back to Cloud Foundry and BOSH, to
the point where I quit my old job and joined Pivotal.

~~~
frabcus
How are you finding Cloud Foundry? Is it good?

I've looked quickly at it, but unlike (say) Heroku, found it hard to know
where to start to host a simple app.

~~~
parasubvert
Pivotal Web Services - Run.pivotal.io - is the CF equivalent to Heroku.
Documentation is at docs.run.pivotal.io. IBM has one at Bluemix.net as well.

CF is very good if you want to run a cloud native / 12 factor app. It's also
rapidly evolving to run rich workloads (TCP router is coming, .NET is in
beta).

I would say CF is more flexible at the kinds of apps and services it can run
as the buildpacks tend to be more sophisticated forks of the Heroku
buildpacks, or new from scratch buildpacks (like PHP, Or Java). Docker images
should be hostable in the near future as well.

Whereas the service levels and instance sizing flexibility available from
Heroku tends to be richer.

This is a function of where both companies make their money. Heroku only makes
money from their public cloud, whereas Pivotal is focused on selling high end
subscriptions for those who want to run their own private CF on Amazon or
VMware or OpenStack.

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cryowaffle
Glad to see the healthcare.gov debacle leading to a positive shift in
mentality at .gov.

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
As someone who worked in the Federal sphere, nothing's changed at all.

The same procurement rules and regulations remain in place with all the issues
they cause. 18F is a nice experiment, and they do have some wins, but they are
just a drop in the bucket.

The whole procurement and management process is so broken that it's a wonder
any project gets completed. The same few bad actors keep winning contracts
over and over again, fail, but then don't have any repercussions. In fact,
their failures actually net them _more_ money more often than not as contracts
get extended now that the contractor has the government by the balls.

IMO the best thing the government could do is a _massive_ in-housing of
functions. So much infrastructure within the Federal sphere has contractors
essentially acting as PMs, the rank and file builders, the maintenance staff,
etc., all with many layers of prime contractors and subs stuffed with
middlemen.

This doesn't go just for IT. Lots of simple functions are outsourced to little
benefit. Some of it I think might be because it's hard to fire Federal workers
and contractors aren't unionized, but it would be better to fix those issues
than hire the same person for twice the salary (when accounting for middlemen,
margins, etc.)

~~~
pc86
I'm inclined to agree, but I have two questions regarding that:

1\. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their
private-sector counterparts? 2\. Doesn't that mean that "government software"
would end up being written by below-average developers and be significantly
worse than private-sector software?

Not that #2 isn't possible/likely/a fact under the current system depending on
who you speak to.

~~~
dragonwriter
> 1\. Aren't government positions notoriously underpaid compared to their
> private-sector counterparts?

Yes.

> 2\. Doesn't that mean that "government software" would end up being written
> by below-average developers and be significantly worse than private-sector
> software?

Assuming that that is the case, the fact that government positions are
notoriously underpaid compared to private-sector counterparts would also imply
a significant skill deficit in those overseeing and managing government
contracts for outsourced work compared to the people employed by the private
contractors to exploit the contracting system for maximum profit.

So, if we assume that public sector pay deficits mean, on average, public
sector skill deficits, then so long as you don't address the pay deficits,
you're stuck with either :

(1) Government software being substandard quality because its made by people
with substandard skill working in government, or

(2) Government software being substandard quality because of substandard
controls and quality assessment being exercised in the process of contracting
out the work to private firms seeking to profit from government contracting
process.

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wpears
The video at the "byzantine regulatory framework" link[1] is worth a watch (at
least the first 10 minutes to get a taste). One of the most valuable offerings
of cloud.gov is (hopefully) the ease with which it can go through the ATO and
FISMA processes because it was designed with them in mind.

[1][https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T1S52B1-NT4)

~~~
sailfast
I'm not sure how this will expedite the ATO process as it uses technology that
has not been STIG'd yet and may not have a "by the book" way to sign off
(Docker, for instance, can be painful to ATO).

EDIT: After viewing Noah's FISMA guidance vid (nice work) there is definitely
possibility to expedite but to really grease things you'd want to create a
certification arm within GSA that can sign off the risk or perform a
"certified" risk assessment on behalf of the customer agency so you could do
things your way while still allowing them to sleep at night. Once you get into
sensitive data loads and non-public stuff people start to get even more risk
averse. / End Edit

That said, I'm hopeful that it does pave the way for change because this kind
of platform is critical to reducing the barriers to experimentation in
government. Perhaps because 18F is committing to supporting / upgrading the
platform it will allow Federal CIOs and CISOs to shift some of the risk to 18F
and sign the paperwork more quickly.

~~~
aidanfeldman
Those teams definitely exist in agencies (GSA included), but we (18F) are
managing ATOs internally for our projects, and are working on tooling to
clarify, simplify, and automate the process. [https://github.com/18F/control-
masonry/](https://github.com/18F/control-masonry/) is our first project around
this.

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ceworthington
This is awesome work that is going to make it easier for a number of our
digital service teams across government to deploy services.

[shameless plug to join public service for a year or two]

If you're interested in joining 18F or the U.S. Digital Service (which has an
HQ office in the White House but also has teams across government), this
application works for both teams:
[https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply](https://www.whitehouse.gov/usds/apply)

~~~
wslack
<3

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js2
I loathe the politics/bureaucracy of working at large companies, and yet oddly
find myself wanting to work for 18F.

~~~
sliverstorm
There are upsides to big companies, and if they can keep the downsides
(beuracracy, etc) under control... Once upon a time HP was supposedly a
phenomenal place to work.

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dmerrick
Slightly off-topic, but the "Butt-to-Butt" browser extension makes this
headline quite amusing.

[0] [http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png](http://i.imgur.com/3q9Ujy0.png)

[1] [https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-
plus/...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/butt-to-butt-
plus/apmlngnhgbnjpajelfkmabhkfapgnoai)

~~~
degenerate
Looks like the extension doesn't event let you type "cloud" in a text box...
it probably changes it before submitting the form. Heh.

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chipgap98
That gif is really stressing me out for some reason

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michaelmior
It took me a couple viewings to decide if this was a successful launch or if
something went wrong.

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pimlottc
It is maddening trend, how a few seconds of video is often clipped out of a
larger video and inserted, on infinite loop, in another document with no
direct reference or explanation.

~~~
bmogilefsky
Good point... I'll make the GIF a link back to the original YouTube video.

EDIT: Which is here, by the way!
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6u4WjYaX2Q)

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lifeisstillgood
I am really enthusiastic about the potential for building Eco-systems of small
developer companies that focus on building the thousands and thousands of
package that governments the world over need for their stutory obligations

The blueprint for USDS was the UK digital service, this is hitting some issues
as they have started a ball rolling but now look like a bottleneck. Some of
the "agile" restrictions and some of the centralised nature of development
teams are likely to go - but the essence is a fantastic opportunity and
landscape ahead

(See my site gratuitous I know but
[http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto](http://www.oss4gov.org/manifesto))

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Splines
> _The magic happens when an infrastructure team encapsulates their expertise,
> and then exposes that expertise as a service which can be used directly by
> developers._

I like this statement - how do you deal with educating team members on areas
that require deep expertise? (e.g.., security, accessibility, localization).

Do you offer training, brown-bags, educational videos, or do you say "don't
worry about it - if you do this in $x way, magic[1] will take care of you".

[1] Magic being defined as the compiler, automated tests, etc., feeding into a
central feedback system (bugs, tickets, email, or whatever you use) telling
you what you did wrong, and hopefully how to fix it.

~~~
bmogilefsky
[Author of the 18F blog post here]

Accessibility and L10N are app-level concerns, not something that cloud.gov is
going to be able to help with. However, 18F works on other efforts aimed at
helping people do those things better, eg [https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-
design-standards/](https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/28/web-design-standards/)

As for security and other devops concerns, which is what cloud.gov is about:
This is why we're in a scaling/pilot phase now. A successful PaaS should
reduce the depth of expertise needed to do those things right. That said,
there are things like awareness of 12factor.net app design principles which
are very unevenly distributed in government once you get outside of 18F. We
will be concentrating on generating materials and documentation to make
learning about those things in the context of cloud.gov as self-service as
possible, and expand the pilot outward to those who need help even approaching
the concept of a PaaS once we have more of those materials.

------
dlapiduz
If you are interested in contributing to cloud.gov check out all our open
source repos:
[https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/](https://docs.cloud.gov/ops/repos/)

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BinaryIdiot
Oh this is interesting. Reminds me of the EzBake platform that's only been
briefly talked about
([http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/librar...](http://www.cloudera.com/content/cloudera/en/resources/library/presentation/cloudera-
federal-forum-2014--ezbake--the-dodiis-app-engine.html)).

I wonder how many agencies will allow developers to jump into this; seems many
of the agencies have a "must be built internally here" attitude about some of
this stuff. Still, looks like a good step forward.

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Yhippa
The more I am observing the government I wonder if it will ever be possible
for the the 18F treatment to hit the more old traditional Federal Government
agencies like CMS. Talk about byzantine regulations.

~~~
aidanfeldman
[https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-developer](https://github.com/18F/CMS.gov-
developer) :-)

~~~
Yhippa
This. Is. Amazing. Thanks for the link! I am digging this so far.

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eonw
I think 18F is a great idea and seems to be doing good things, but are there
not existing options they can use? Why reinvent the wheel?

~~~
tvanantwerp
I saw several people from 18F present at Code for America Summit the other
week, and my understanding is that the regulatory overhead involved in
launching new government tech services (something like 4000 pages of relevant
regulations to comply with) is so large that it's usually a boondoggle. Part
of what they are doing is building services with that regulatory compliance
built into it, so agencies don't have to slog through all of that for every
little thing they want built.

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mc32
Wonder if this will have long term impact on the likes of amazon's gov cloud.
Looks like their tools facilitate their adoption.

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mitchell_h
wondering that too. HP's cloud has a gov wing also.

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lebiru
Cool initiative, but companies that have state government as clients would not
agree to a federally hosted cloud based service.

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brianpan
I think the potential for cloud.gov is to expand to other federal agencies,
not private companies.

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bmogilefsky
Yes, that is the scope and intent for now, although there is potential for
state agencies to make use of it as well.

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motyar
You must check [http://cloud.gov.in](http://cloud.gov.in) too

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plonh
This is cool, but,...18F are consultants, who pop in, wave a magic wand, and
pop out. Many of its employees are.bound by law to a max 2 or 4 year term.
Will cloud.gov support its users for 5, 10, 15 years?

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toomuchtodo
18F are _not_ consultants. They're federal employees with a term limit who are
domain experts.

EDIT: See sailfast's comment below. I think we're quibbling over semantics.

~~~
sailfast
A chunk of 18F are consultants to other government agencies and provide their
services to government for a 100% cost-reimbursable fee for specific projects,
much like a private consulting firm.
[https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/](https://18f.gsa.gov/consulting/)
[https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-
hiring/position...](https://pages.18f.gov/joining-18f/who-we-are-
hiring/positions/resource-manager/)

