What happens when you combine cloud computing, open source, containers and a federal agency who wants to change how data center services are provided? You get a solution like NASA’s Nebula Cloud Computing Platform.

The container is here from DataCenterKnowledge.

NASA’s Nebula: The Cloud in a Container
December 2nd, 2009 : Rich Miller

The Verari data center container housing the NASA Nebula cloud computing application arrives at Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.

What do you get when you combine cloud computing and data center containers? You get NASA’s Nebula, the space agency’s new data powerhouse, which provides on-demand computing power for NASA researchers. Nebula was recently cited by federal CIO Vivek Kundra as an example of the government’s ability to “leverage the most innovative technologies.”

The Cloud Computing is built on open source SW for eucalyptus

The media event had Vivek Kundra, Federal CIO. In the speech below Vivek 2000 – 2006 points out the federal data centers have doubled their energy use. He is actually anti-data center growth for the traditional model. There are 8 GSA data centers, and 23 homeland security data centers. All built on old models with 100s of millions dollars spent to build data centers the size of city block. There needs to be a new way where there are lower costs and a a greener impact.

Apps.gov is the highlighted site demo’d in the above presentation.