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Comment by rambos | Hacker News Reader

As someone who develops for a Gov't agency, this is the wrong move. So much money has been spent on mimicking the private sector innovators. Millions and millions of tax dollars spent on these type of projects.

The focus really needs to be on building a process to better integrate private cloud services and gov't applications. I mean they already are for the most part: https://aws.amazon.com/compliance/fedramp/

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/TrustCenter/Compliance/FedRA...

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160229005262/en/Serv...

Seriously this is just another wasteful program. The Gov't and 18F will hype it up, but don't be fooled.

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You listed two IaaS provider and one SaaS provider. cloud.gov is a PaaS provider. There is no FedRAMP PaaS available to agencies, and PaaS is the level of abstraction needed to accelerate delivery of services the government itself provides.

We also leverage the fact that AWS GovCloud already has FedRAMP status as an IaaS to accelerate our delivery of cloud.gov (which sits on top of it), so we're piggy-backing on the money and effort already spent and eliminating the millions we would otherwise spend by having the government run the IaaS layer.

In other words...

> The focus really needs to be on building a process to better integrate private cloud services and gov't applications.

...that's what we're doing!

Actually, there are several FedRAMP PaaS' available to agencies. A quick look at https://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/ lists several compliant PaaS offerings, including one (Autonomic Resources LLC – ARCWRX) based on OpenShift. It's great to see activity in this space.

Correct - Multiple PaaS providers have reached FedRAMP already:

http://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/blackme...

http://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/autonom...

Both built on Red Hat OpenShift

Acquia is FedRAMP accredited as well. Acquia is optimized for Drupal. Drupal now powers 40% of .gov sites in the US (and growing). It's a fully managed and supported platform, which offers not only the CLI integrations that developers appreciate but accessible, responsive GUI DevOps tools and 24/7/365 application support.

https://www.fedramp.gov/marketplace/compliant-systems/acquia...

> So much money has been spent on mimicking the private sector innovators.

They're using open source Cloud Foundry, literally to avoid spending millions of dollars mimicking the private sector innovators.

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