Desktop as a Service for a Single Secure Software Baseline

Within the DoD software ecosystem, Kubernetes, Desktops, and Virtual Machines are all on their own separate tech baselines. This creates a terrible user experience and makes it expensive to support and sustain capabilities. However, it is possible to support Desktops, VMs, and containers all for air-gapped Kubernetes at the edge. Doing so allows for easier accreditation, a better user experience, and significant cloud savings. All mission-centric organizations struggle to scale mission applications across a multitude of cloud, on-prem, and edge environments. Many of these organizations rely on desktop-native applications, or applications that cannot be fully containerized. The desktop-native architecture of these applications limits the ability to adopt common technical baselines such as Platform One’s Big Bang to accelerate and sustain continuous delivery. Many of these organizations have adopted digital engineering and DevSecOps practices prior to the availability of the DoD enterprise DevSecOps platform and now have a “forked” infrastructure baseline. Forked baselines complicate or prevent interactions between legacy and cloud native applications, limit the ability to leverage modern security technologies for system observability (e.g., monitoring, scanning, logging, and alerting), and require duplication of efforts to manage separate infrastructure stacks. To solve this specific problem, and demonstrate a solution applicable to many programs sustaining legacy applications, Defense Unicorns will validate and integrate a cloud-native Desktop-as-a-Service capability into Big Bang to allow virtual machines and desktop native applications to be orchestrated inside Big Bang-managed infrastructure. Defense Unicorns will also validate and demonstrate the ability to deploy Big Bang and the Desktop-as-a-Service capability with our air gap delivery tool, ZARF.  As noted in Volume 5 “Prior, Current, or Pending Support of Similar Proposals or Awards,” Defense Unicorns previously submitted a Phase II proposal in November 2021 for related work, including a Desktop as a Service capability. The proposal (No F2-15138). was submitted to AFWERX against topic AF21A-TCSO1; the proposal resulted in contract award (contract No. FA864922P0692). The principal investigator was “Andrew Greene,” who remains employed by Defense Unicorns. This proposal was funded and the primary difference is that the effort under contract No. FA864922P0692 stops short of developing a Desktop as a Service capability; it developed a VM capability on k8s first. This current proposal would also be looking to combine that Desktop as a Service capability (Baffles) with Defense Unicorn’s Air Gap tool (Zarf).