Partly an object of anticipation, partly of dread, cloud computing has been in the news as initial federal try-outs promise to become models for future capabilities. Out with a book on how to handle the cloud is Charles Babcock, an Information Week editor-at-large. The book, "Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can't Afford to Be Left Behind," it includes a chapter on NASA's Nebula Cloud Computing Platform.

We've got the chapter and we're making it available as a .pdf, with a link at the bottom of an initial excerpt here. Also check out an interview we recently did with Babcock and be sure to follow FierceGovernmentIT's coverage of cloud computing in the federal government.

NEBULA: NASA'S
STRATEGIC CLOUD

The federal government wants to reduce the heterogeneous nature of federal data centers by figuring out a way to build them to a more common standard and reduce the burgeoning expense of IT for U.S. citizens. There's early evidence that the government thinks that cloud computing is part of the answer.

Like that of the modern business world, the government's appetite for computing power keeps growing, and the number and types of data centers are increasing along with it. NASA has been a target of critics who say that federal agencies spend too much on information technology and create too many computing centers. NASA, with its Houston Space Flight Center, Cape Kennedy launch site, Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California, and Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, among other branches, has a need for shareable resources that can be easily accessed by employees in locations other than the one in which the data center was built. In that sense, NASA has sometimes served as a symbol for the federal government as a whole, where the number of data centers has proliferated, growing from 498 centers 10 years ago to more than 1,200 today.

The federal government now spends $76 billion a year on information technology, and Vivek Kundra, the first chief information officer overseeing all federal data centers, appointed in 2009 by President Barack Obama, has endorsed the concept of cloud computing as one way to bring escalating costs under control.

Kundra made a splash in September 2009 when he launched apps.gov, a simple marketplace and rudimentary form of cloud computing where federal agencies can go to buy software. But another project has been proceeding behind the scenes for the last 18 months, one whose long-term goals are more ambitious than those of apps.gov: the Nebula Cloud Computing Platform. The Nebula Cloud Computing Platform is being worked on at the same site where Kundra announced apps.gov, the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, California.

Read all of "Nebula: NASA's Strategic Cloud," a chapter from Charles Babcock's new book on cloud computing. The chapter, and the book, are copyright The McGraw-Hill  Companies, Inc.