US Navy successfully connects aircraft carrier to the cloud | Hacker News Reader

US Navy successfully connects aircraft carrier to the cloud

datacenterdynamics.com

28 pointsbelter39 comments

"I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command" --Commander William Adama

Nuclear submarines are Class C networks (/24, citing Bill Cheswick's last talk at the socal linux expo[0]) in case anyone was curious.

I assume aircraft carriers have a bigger footprint.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/live/V_sqiff41gs 1 hr 27 minutesish

China's satellites (Jilin-1, etc.) can essentially track things across the world in seconds versus minutes (i.e. it can follow a plane, or car on the street in real-time). So I'm guessing "radio silence" does not affect much locational opsec at this point.

It’s pretty crazy the technology that’s out there that we’ll never see / experience without working some high-level gov job.

You’ll be promptly disillusioned if you do

Governments aren’t ahead of the private sector and arent doing parallel innovation with their massive budgets, just knowing industry trends gets you an understanding of what to expect

They do pay for edge connections of technology that will never exist in the civilian space though.

They're ahead in very specific ways, mostly where there's no commercial activity that would justify the expense of investing in that area. e.g. extremely high resolution imaging satellites.

I would imagine that the location of carrier groups is basically known at all times to serious adversaries, regardless of emissions. They're not exactly small and if you're doing it right they don't dive underwater.

> The connectivity has been enabled by Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (P-LEO) satellite services

Does this mean Starlink, or are there other private competitors in this space (a quick web search refers to 19 other companies that have bid on contracts for P-LEO)?

Also, I didn't follow what exactly does Oracle have to do with this - they are hardly the only cloud provider, and not even the one with the most government contracts?

"The infrastructure has been designed to be able to use a variety of connectivity mechanisms, including the military's SATCOM, and Starlink."

Why buy one, when you can buy two at twice the price?

(Yes, Contact)

Per the article, Starlink and some military SATCOM systems. It's apparently not tied to a specific satellite family (which is a good thing).

There's a few options even without Starlink: Oneweb, Iridium, Inmarsat, viasat among others.

Can you push terabytes through those daily? I had understood they're quite slow

I'm not sure, but I believe most of those constellations are launching newer generations which are intended to handle higher volume data.

Yeah the Oracle blurb was not embedded well. The presumedly paid writer did a shoddy job.

Does anyone want Oracle cloud on their ship? Seems like an odd flex to say they can deploy 3 racks of servers and build a small data center. Thats plenty of compute for a medium sized business.

Sounds like they installed a Starlink/Starshield antenna and can get emails now.

Aircraft-Carrier-as-A-Service. Looking towards that.

The upsell on the pricing is ridiculous…

But will it only bill me for the minutes I use it?

Oracle will bill me for the whole ocean, I’m sure. The aircraft carrier might stop there.

I thought I once got an email from Hurricane Electric about a Carrier Networking event on the USS Hornet, although I can only find references for a customer appreciation event. [1]

[1] https://forums.he.net/index.php?topic=1777.0

I remember long ago there was a lan party hosted on the hornet.

I hear it comes equipped with the "Started WW3 accidentally" footgun.

And for the first time in 15 years the blaster worm found a new computer system to infect…

> missile defense must now restart because the Remote Procedure Call (RPC) Service terminated unexpectedly.

Actual article: https://federalnewsnetwork.com/navy/2024/06/navy-project-bri...

Apparently the F-35 logistics systems ALIS/ODIN are "in the cloud".

Can't wait for it to backfire

Why would it? It's just an upgraded satellite connection for non-classified traffic.

"The connectivity has been enabled by Proliferated Low Earth Orbit (P-LEO) satellite services - constellations of satellite services that form mesh networks via optical links." - AKA Starlink. In Musk, we trust, I guess. (I don't).

Just because he acts like a total tool does not arbitrarily make SpaceX not a viable defense contractor. Why can people not separate Musk the (very abrasive) person from his companies?

China has tremendous leverage over him via whether he can access their markets.

He's already beat out in their market, not much leverage there lol.

A 50 billionaire that someone could take a billion of… tremendous?

The goal for Tesla was to jumpstart the electric car industry by example, not to sell electric cars in China.

Tesla built 51% of their global production in Shanghai, China in Q1 2024.

The leverage isn't just shutting down the China market, it's the threat to 51% of Tesla's production capacity.

Tell that to his net worth.

They must fight the social-justice war on all fronts.

Because he runs them and can, and does make terrible decisions on their behalf.

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