Every major cloud provider is using Linux network drivers written by NASA employees.
In 1994 the NASA Beowulf project pioneered the idea of clustering together cheap commodity hardware to replace mainframes (this concept was later used to bootstrap hardware for Google)
NASA helped start the OpenStack project which powers a number of cloud providers.
Heck, NASA helped invent the GRiD Compass, the first laptop computer.
Does anyone still uses OpenStack? It seems to have been super hyped and then disappeared.
AWS accounts still take management and a team of people that need to maintain a whole lot of different aspects of it, so you're not really saving on headcount. You're just moving that capex to opex.
It's important to be flexible enough to be able to deploy onto a cloud provider if the situation demands (e.g., new client demands infrastructure run in $FOREIGN_REGION_X where you don't already have a DC), but everyone's insistence on going 1000% AWS is absurd and IMO totally unjustifiable.
For what AWS provides, the DIY approach would be insanely expensive and wasteful. Not to mention, it would take years to build a basic MVP. They'd have to scope out the project, hire people just to design it, and then pay for several contractors just to stand up the first iteration of a working system (which will still not compare to AWS in terms of resiliency, redundancy, and accessibility), and then maintain it....forever. Also, many people already know how to interact with AWS. NASA would also need to design and maintain user-access methods to the data, on top of just plugging in thousands of hard drives and making them all work nicely together.
Why reinvent the wheel when there is a perfectly good wheel manufacturer that has already proven extremely successful at what they do?
Indeed. I am glad to see them leveraging the power of an already proven infrastructure provider rather than spending X billions of dollars trying to build and maintain their own.