Cloud.gov

Cloud.gov is a product built and maintained by a team within 18F as part of the U.S. General Services Administration (GSA)’s Technology Transformation Service. Cloud.gov helps United States government agencies buy, build, and authorize modern cloud services.

Cloud.gov is a secure and compliant Platform as a Service (PaaS) to help federal agencies deliver services to the public in a faster, more user-centered way. All federal agencies have a mandate to deploy products in the cloud; a centralized, open-source PaaS model, one that is already compliant with federal rules, reduces the work and cost of cloud adoption by those agencies. The federal agency's team is responsible for its own product’s code, and the cloud.gov platform handles the security and maintenance of everything underneath. It is built to keep applications online, even with large numbers of users and sharp increases in usage.

Cloud.gov runs on top of industry-provided infrastructure. Currently, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the Infrastructure as a Service provider. The platform includes access to some of the most popular AWS services while removing the complexity of managing it. The cloud.gov PaaS is open source and based on the Cloud Foundry project, which provides portability to other cloud providers or an existing on-premise solution.

On February 2, 2017, cloud.gov obtained a Provisional Authority to Operate (P-ATO) from the FedRAMP Joint Authorization Board (JAB). This means cloud.gov has undergone a significant, thorough security and compliance review so that agencies can focus on their own system review. Cloud.gov has a "moderate level" authorization, which means it is a vetted and trustable service for data where the impact of loss is limited or serious but not catastrophic. FedRAMP requires cloud.gov to undergo re-assessment every year and maintain continuous monitoring.