Chris Lynch, the outgoing head of the Defense Digital Service, reflects on the last year of fights over the Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative cloud contract.
Back in November 1988, Robert Tappan Morris, son of the famous cryptographer Robert Morris Sr., was a 20-something graduate student at Cornell who wanted to know how big the internet was – that is, how many devices were connected to it. So he wrote a program that would travel from computer to computer and ask each machine to send a signal back to a control server, which would keep count.
The JEDI cloud contract, released for comment March 7, 2018, is designed to improve the whole Department of Defense's ability to complete missions and securely enable the war fighter.