GDIT’s DeepSky lab mirrors government environments allowing teams to test new capabilities and collaborate with technology partners, industry partners, emerging technology companies and academia to incubate and prototype new solutions. This reduces the risk for customers and accelerates the development of capabilities in areas such as cloud, AI, cyber, 5G, and high-performance computing.
GDIT teams and customers in St. Louis, Mo., Springfield, Va. and around the world can access DeepSky remotely and collaborate in real-time, accelerating innovation and feedback cycles and effectively demonstrate a solution before implementation. This multi-regional approach allows for replication and testing of multi-deployment, edge, and cloud solutions.
In Action for Geospatial Customers
Today, DeepSky is proving to be an effective environment for demonstrating artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. In line with the federal government’s acceleration toward the cloud, the DeepSky team is also building and testing several new cloud and software capabilities – which began with Azure and AWS integrations and expanded to include a variety of services, integrations, and data management capabilities. The team also works on application virtualizations and virtual desktop infrastructure to support large user environments on-premise, in the cloud, or hybrid-based.
While DeepSky models customer enterprise environments, its low barrier of entry means teams can quickly test hardware, software, and advanced capabilities in unclassified environments, and quickly transfer, test, and code to classified environments, where it can immediately be used by the customer. Modifying code or bringing in a new feature is simpler with this continuous integration and continuous development approach as well. Working closely with DevSecOps practitioners, new capabilities can be quickly developed in a test environment and deployed to production on the same day, bringing immediate value.
Benefits that Pay Dividends
In addition to speed and accelerated development and deployment, the DeepSky environment allows teams to rapidly test products from our vendors while mitigating risk for the customer. DeepSky also facilitates a deeper level of customer collaboration enabling them to provide feedback on the fly.
The DeepSky environment has proven to be an effective capability for GDIT to partner with technical and analyst roles across mission partners. It has helped to create strong vendor partnerships across the hardware, software and cloud domains with more than 50 vendor capabilities currently operating in the lab. In turn, vendors receive feedback that aids their product development with better integrations and better security for government.
From a developer’s point of view, working in the DeepSky is an easy and seamless experience, which provides pipelines, tools and a workspace that enables them to rapidly develop software and solutions.
Already on the Horizon
Looking ahead the DeepSky team is working on a variety of 5G and edge computing capabilities that will enable faster, more robust processing at ever-more decentralized locations – such as rugged small tactical edge devices that can be carried in a backpack and can withstand the elements. The DeepSky environment is essential for quickly developing specialized, mission critical solutions that can be immediately deployed and used by customers.
The DeepSky lab is just one example of how GDIT is fostering innovation and promoting “the art of the possible” for customers in the intelligence and defense communities and across the federal government.