NASA will be storing information on nebulas only on Amazon soon. Image: bobfamiliar/Flickr

NASA was one of the primary driving forces behind OpenStack, an effort to provide an open source alternative to Amazons widely popular cloud services. But as OpenStack takes off in other places, the space agency is turning away from the open source platform and into the arms of Amazon.

As Amazon happily pointed out on its Amazon Web Services blog, NASA chief information officer Linda Cureton recently told the world that in moving part of its infrastructure to Amazons cloud, the space agency can save about a million dollars a year. With Amazon Web Services, or AWS, you get instant access to online storage and virtual servers so you neednt set up your own hardware.

Cureton discussed a host of other technologies set to come online at the space agency. But there was no mention of OpenStack, an open source platform that lets you build an Amazon-like service inside your own data center. The idea is that you can give your employees instant access to computing resources in much the same way Amazon provides such virtual infrastructure to the world at large.

NASA co-founded the project with Rackspace in 2009, after years of developing code for its own internal infrastructure, but as Gigaom reported in late May, the space agency is now halting development of software for the open source platform.

Since its inception, many of the key contributors of NASAs OpenStack project have left the space agency for the private sector. Chris Kemp, a former chief technology officer at NASA, left to found Nebula, an outfit that offers hardware devices for building Openstack clouds. Joshua McKenty founded Piston Cloud Computing, which seeks to bring a version of OpenStack to traditional businesses. And several other members of the team that built NASAs OpenStack code now work for Rackspace.

McKenty says that Curetons plans are certainly a win for Amazon, but plays down the impact of her decisions, saying she has authority over the practices of the agencys central operation, but not over the individual NASA research centers, including NASA Ames, where OpenStack was developed. As a whole, he believes, NASA is still a diverse mix of cloud technologies such as Terramark and Lockheed Martin.

I see this totally out of context with whatever else NASA is doing as far as data center consolidation, virtualization, private cloud, all the stack software and everything else, McKenty tells Wired.

In addition to Rackspace, OpenStack is backed by HP, Cisco, IBM, and Red Hat, and project organizers claim over 3,000 contributors. A spokesman for NASA said that while the agency still had interest in the platform, its needs were being met through commercial offerings i.e. Amazon Web Services and others.

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NASA Embraces Amazon Cloud, Leaves OpenStack Behind