I am excited to announce that cloud.gov has become a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform. This is the first time a government agency will offer a certified platform based on Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. Cloud.gov joins Atos, Huawei, IBM, VMware, SAP, Swisscom and the newly-announced SUSE as a certified provider. All certified offerings use the same core Cloud Foundry software and ensure application and skill portability across providers. Cloud.gov is FedRAMP authorized, and focuses on offering a certified Cloud Foundry platform to federal agencies.
Digital transformation offices in every government around the world have been working overtime to improve the digital experiences of their citizens. We are humbled by the role that Cloud Foundry is playing in many of these efforts, from the UK to Australia to the Netherlands to South Korea. As the preferred platform for production workloads in more than half of the Fortune 500, Cloud Foundry remains the leading platform for governments intent on improving user experience, while also requiring a unique level of security and scalability.
18F is an office within the United States General Services Administration (GSA). 18F runs cloud.gov to support the reinvention of citizen services in the digital age. In fact, we published an interview with the 18F team’s Bret Mogilefsky in 2016, shortly after cloud.gov was announced to offer a way for federal agencies to host and update websites, APIs, and other applications in a secure, federally compliant environment. In 2017, cloud.gov became FedRAMP Authorized, guaranteeing it had met the standards of a comprehensive security and compliance assessment.
Understandably, every industry requires unique technological benefits, whether it’s security for financial services, scalability for e-commerce stores or continuous delivery for industrial IoT. Federal agencies face a unique set of challenges when it comes to compliance and regulation, which is why the advent of cloud.gov is so significant. The platform was designed specifically as a centralized, open source PaaS, thanks to 18F’s open source ethos — which it shares with the larger Cloud Foundry community. This spirit of openness, transparency and communication is what I love most about open source — and plays a significant role in why Cloud Foundry makes so much sense in the U.S. government.
18F’s use of Cloud Foundry encourages progress within other countries’ digital transformation offices, as the team shares technological advancements with fellow government workers around the globe to provide the best possible experience for citizens worldwide.
So how does cloud.gov work? It’s an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) built using Cloud Foundry, enabling portability to multiple cloud providers, and ensures application availability despite usage spikes. In addition to portability, scalability, and flexibility, Cloud Foundry gives cloud.gov the ability to handle security and maintenance. You can read more about the benefits of cloud.gov here.
As the Executive Director of the Cloud Foundry Foundation, I see Cloud Foundry utilized across all industries around the world — and I am especially thrilled about the ways in which Cloud Foundry is being used to improve global citizen experience. Cloud.gov becoming a Certified Platform goes above and beyond — it makes it possible for over 430 federal agencies in the United States to take advantage of the digital transformation benefits of Cloud Foundry. This is an enormous leap forward for government and for citizens. This touches everyone — and is deeply connected to the open source ethos the Foundation shares with 18F. Open source is for everyone, and cloud.gov becoming a Cloud Foundry Certified Platform ensures this is possible.
If you’re at our Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston this week, be sure to check out our full-day track on government use cases of Cloud Foundry. And if you see the 18F team at the Boston Convention Center, please — give them a huge thank you.
