NEBULA, The Blueprint for BCIP

I’ve been buried with Sprint review preparation and a painful introduction to DDS (thanks Mitre). Sorry for the gap.

Well, it looks like NASA has beat us to the architectural punch. NEBULA is proclaimed to be a “self-service” computing platform, built out of Open Source pieces. Just glancing at the system “box” diagram it is easy to see that they envision the full-range of “hosting” options as we’ve drawn in our preliminary sketches of BCIP. NEBULA includes EC-like virtual hosting, as well as an app-hosting platform based on Django. Cool.

We obviously need to reach out to them to discuss the potential for gleaming their discovery and decision matrices - in order to prevent wasted energy researching.

There are a couple of things that don’t really align with our “individuals first” thinking. NEBULA has integrated Trac, a python based, project-centric platform that sits on top of Subversion. Where we think a Github(like) addresses our problem-solver needs, but still provides project capabilities like issue tracking and wikis. I do understand the logic behind the Trac decisions though. Testing and continuous integration should be provided to any project with the need. It is a question I’m sure we’ll have to answer.

Hopefully, I’ll have more insight in the near future - and some good fortune in attempting to reuse NASA’s efforts.