Kessel Run support

Raft to Deliver Services Supporting Kessel Run’s Cloud CITI Effort

Raft, a technology consulting firm headquartered in Reston, Virginia, has been awarded a $36 million contract to support the Cloud Computing and IT Integration effort of the Air Force’s Kessel Run software factory.

The deal calls for the provision of DevSecOps software engineering expertise, Kubernetes infrastructure and multi-region platform services to facilitate the modernization of Kessel Run’s legacy software systems.

Contact work will also support external software initiatives across the Department of Defense, Raft said.

Kessel Run is headquartered at the Hanscom Air Force Base in Massachusetts and operates as part of the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center. Its mission is to deliver on-demand combat capabilities that can sense and respond to conflict in any domain.

One of the software capabilities developed by Kessel Run is a chaos engineering tool. The solution exposes network weaknesses by emulating manageable persistent enemy attacks on a system.

Kessel Run first showcased the tool’s emulation capabilities in the summer of 2020. A key learning from previous demonstrations is how to “control the blast radius” of potential security incidents, lead engineer Omar Marrero told FedScoop.

The Navy’s Black Pearl is the first software factory outside of Kessel Run to get the tech stack for the chaos engineering tool, as well as the accompanying list of best practices on implementing it.

According to Marrero, the plan is to eventually share the solution to as many coders as possible across the Department of Defense.