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Comment by niels_olson | Hacker News Reader

Interesting sidelight: DoD uses RHEL almost exclusively, so this sort of implies that DoD has no interest in Docker as their container of choice.

Edit: to clarify, I was thinking the HPC systems are RHEL, and account for a fairly large number of RHEL licenses. Certainly the "enterprise" is outlook, sharepoint, and a ton of Win7 terminals.

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DoD is massive and there's a ton of different deployment requirements all over the place. On the systems I've worked on, they've ranged from old RHEL 4.x versions up to CentOS 7 now and also SunOS and Solaris and everything in between. There's been some movement away from COTS software in favor of just paying a contractor to do the support for you when you already pay them tens of thousands per week for development and support in the first place, but this is also tough to generalize. I can only say that DoD has been increasingly budget strapped in most R&D areas and has been clamping down hard on costs (in probably the wrong places as usual, but there's structural problems that keep DoD and federal sector in general from doing the most cost-effective purchasing).

Interesting. All the DoD systems we interface with run Windows. There may be a mixture, we just don't work with those systems.

Valid point. I guess I was thinking the HPC systems. Certainly every client-facing terminal is a Windows box. I don't know much about the network stack, but there's clearly a lot of Windows there too.

We're an external partner pulling data via a 24/7 Windows-based web service, a system of record. The three we work with are all Windows, but three is likely a blip in their system count.

All I know is it's weird how they and their vendors manage the systems and environments. Glad it isn't me!

This is terrifying on so many levels, but hardly surprising.

I'll just say that your intuition on this one is not correct.

Take a look at the GSA presentation with Booz Allen at DockerCon.

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