Simulation based training systems are used widely across the Army to train military personnel on a wide array of skillsets. These systems are typically developed, integrated, and maintained by Department of Defense (DoD) contractors. In support of this, the Army pays for the hardware resources required by the contractors for development, integration, and testing purposes. This requires a significant Army investment in the instantiation and maintenance of these hardware environments.
This paper will discuss an approach to potentially reducing these costs by migrating these different environments into the cloud. Along these lines, the U.S. Army Program Executive Office for Simulation, Training and Instrumentation (PEO STRI) is currently developing a Live-Synthetic, Training, and Test and Evaluation Enterprise Architecture (LS TTE EA) framework, with the necessary business model, governance structure and reference architecture mechanisms that support a goal of leveraging the cloud to reduce the overall costs required to support training and operational testing. Towards this goal, PEO STRI has developed a Proof of Concept (PoC) implementation of the reference architecture of the LS TTE EA. In this paper, we provide an overview of the LS TTE EA and discuss how it’s reference architecture PoC implementation can provision the infrastructure required to support development, integration, and test environments needed for the LS TTE EA community of interest. Using this approach, the Army would no longer be required to pay for additional sets of hardware for each contractor, but instead provision the required resources in the cloud on-demand. When the contractor no longer requires the resources they are reclaimed by the cloud and immediately available for use by others. Since Cloud Service Providers follow the “pay for what you use� paradigm, the Army would only be billed for what is actively being used at a given point in time. Along with describing the cloud based provisioning of these environments, the paper provides a high level cost comparison of how it is done today (purchasing resources) compared to the cost of hosting these environments in the cloud.
Potential Reduction of Cost for Software Development and Integration Environments
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