NASA's contribution to OpenStack came in the form of the core compute infrastructure that is a critical part of the overall platform. This week, Jeff Barr of Amazon's Web Services, which is competitive with OpenStack, posted a blog with the title, "NASA Saves Nearly $1M Per Year By Using AWS."

The Amazon post was based on a blog post from NASA CIO Linda Cureton. Cureton notes that NASA is using Amazon Web Services for enterprise infrastructure.

"This cloud-based model supports a wide variety of Web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based, and secure environment while providing almost a million dollars in cost savings each year," Cureton wrote.

Cureton also mentioned that the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) is using the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud platform to host 250,000 pictures of Mars. At no point in her post about NASA's IT reform did Cureton make any mention of NASA's use of OpenStack.

That doesn't mean, however, that NASA is forgoing the use of OpenStack.

Joshua McKenty is the former NASA cloud architect that ran NASA's Nebula project, which was folded into OpenStack Compute in 2010. McKenty left NASA in 2011 and founded his own OpenStack startup called Piston Computing.

McKenty told InternetNews that NASA's IT is managed by dozens of semi-autonomous executives.

"While NASA has stopped funding active development of OpenStack as it has matured, which is very much in keeping with their focus on basic and early-stage applied research, there are still organizations within NASA that are actively scaling up their OpenStack adoption ," McKenty explained.

Read the full story at ServerWatch:

NASA Ditching Open Source OpenStack? Not So Fast

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of the IT Business Edge Network, the network for technology professionals Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.