Raft awarded Air Force contract to support Kessel Run's "Cloud CITI"

RESTON, Va., July 26, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- Raft, LLC, a technology consulting firm dedicated to bridging the gap between humans and data, announced today that it has been awarded a $36 million contract to provide the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center's AFLCMC Detachment 12 – known as "Kessel Run" – with DevSecOps software engineering expertise, Kubernetes infrastructure, and multi-region platform services as part of the Cloud Computing and I.T. Integration (CITI) effort. The contract includes supporting external Department of Defense (DoD) software initiatives, promoting a culture of continuous improvement, and creating warfighter value at Kessel Run.

"Raft is proud to partner with the Air Force and Kessel Run to support the secure, rapid development and delivery of combat capability wherever it is needed and when it is needed most," said Shubhi Mishra, Founder & CEO of Raft. "Kessel Run is truly a transformative force inside the Department of Defense for incremental delivery and continuous learning, and a fantastic fit for Raft's human-centered culture and obsession with the mission."

The Kessel Run software factory is composed of members from the Operational Command and Control Users (OpsC2), Wing Command and Control Users (WingC2), and All Domain Common Platform (ADCP) Program Management Office (PMO) who work together leveraging industry best practices and products to rapidly deliver capabilities while simultaneously scouting for potentially disruptive IT. Kessel Run embraces change through a "smaller is better" mindset, including lean and agile methodologies combined with continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). Underlying all of this is a culture of innovation that balances speed and safety at scale.

"As a non-traditional Woman-Owned Small Business, our team brings innovative open source solutions that enable building distributed systems for our enterprise customers including the Department of Defense, Health & Human Services, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau," stated Raft CTO, Bhaarat Sharma. "We're excited to contribute to the Cloud CITI initiative at Kessel Run and build tools that enable the warfighter to develop mission plans tailored to the immediate mission needs".

Raft will provide macro-level architectural solutions of a multi-region hybrid infrastructure (on-premise and commercial cloud), a cross-cutting application and integration architecture, and a data management and analytics architecture. Specifically, provide DevSecOps software engineering expertise, Kubernetes infrastructure, and multi-region platform services that help Kessel Run modernize Legacy software systems and supporting external DoD software initiatives associated with Kessel Run. 

About Raft:

Raft is a customer-obsessed digital consulting firm specializing in creating data solutions leveraging human-centered design principles to solve mission critical, complex problems for government agencies. We accelerate and enhance their missions through rapid iteration and intense focus on "outcomes over outputs" to deliver maximum impact with everything we do. Raft is a remote-first distributed team of open source contributors and passionate experts in DevSecOps, Kubernetes management, artificial intelligence, and securely connecting humans and systems with data in the cloud, on-premise, and at the operational edge. Learn more at https://goraft.tech.

About Kessel Run:

Kessel Run is the operational name for AFLCMC's Detachment 12. Its mission is to deliver combat capabilities warfighters love and revolutionize the Air Force software acquisition process. From its headquarters at Hanscom Air Force Base (AFB) and with significant supporting assets in Boston, MA (Kessel Run Experimental Lab) and Langley AFB, Kessel Run builds, tests, delivers, operates, and maintains cloud-based infrastructure and war-fighting software applications for use by Airmen worldwide and delivers them on time, as needed, and with efficiency and cost-effectiveness above other acquisition methods or practices in the Air Force and DoD.

SOURCE Raft, LLC