NASA is cutting its contributions to the OpenStack community due to the White House “cloud first,” policy.

It seems ironic. OpenStack is all about the cloud. But NASA never intended to become  cloud platform and now that OpenStack is starting to see enterprise uptake, it’s time to back off, said Karen Petraska, service executive for computing services at the office of the CIO at NASA, who spoke at an Uptime Institute symposium this week (hat tip to DatacenterDynamics).

Instead, Petraska says that the agency is looking to become a “smart consumer” of public cloud services – all according to the agenda of Federal CIO Steven VanRoekel and his predecessor Vivek Kundra. The feds have been seriously pushing the “Cloud First” concept, which holds that any government agency should invest in the cloud where it makes sense, consolidate data center resources across agencies wherever possible, and generally make their IT thinner and more agile.

A side effect, as one might expect, is the rollback of internal IT initiatives. Not only is NASA backing away from OpenStack project, but it’s stopping development on Nebula, its own internal IaaS cloud deployment based on OpenStack architecture. It should be said, though, that NASA still has IT chops, as evidenced by Ensemble, an agile development platform using DevOps methodologies designed for no less than the Mars Rover.

It’s not as dramatic as all that. NASA and the rest of the government is facing pressures from above to cut spending even and boost productivity. If not for the public cloud, those would be complete contradictions in terms. Meanwhile, OpenStack’s cause has been taken up in a big way by companies like Rackspace, HP and AT&T, with an active developer community arising around it.

So yes, it’s sad that a co-founder has to just short of leave OpenStack behind just as the party’s really getting started, but at the same time, it’s a sign of how far the project has come that NASA can leave without risking a collapse.