History of DI2E & announcement of DI2-ME

Author: Andrew Roth, Software Engineer at Defense Unicorns

Almost a decade ago, the U.S. Government’s Intelligence Community stood up a software factory tool stack called Defense Intelligence Information Enterprise (DI2E) and provided it free of charge to any government program that wanted to use it. This was an enormous benefit as it contained many of the capabilities that modern software teams that practice DevSecOps use, such as source code management and version control, automated workflows, issue tracking, documentation repositories, artifact management, code quality analysis, security scanning, and collaboration.

Over the years, it has been used by every major command, service, and agency in the DoD and the Intelligence Community. It has supported thousands of software development and project management groups and enabled sharing of work and ideas across many efforts that had historically been in isolation.

And then it was killed.

We don’t have the full picture of why it was killed; only that politics were involved. What we’re sure of is that an enormous void has been left in its place. Most of the teams and organizations that were using DI2E when it was killed are being forced to independently come up with a “Plan B” with very little guidance and no additional funding.

In January 2022, in partnership with some of our trusted mission partners, we started building an open source, self-contained, Do-It-Yourself “software factory in a box” that we have nicknamed “DI2-ME”. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible for a software engineering organization to run their own tool stack with capabilities as good as, or better than, DI2Es. While development is still ongoing, a basic functionality threshold has been crossed. We are excited to announce DI2-ME as a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) that can be used to quickly get up and running with one’s own software factory toolset.

Here’s a quick feature comparison between what DI2E offered and what DI2-ME offers (or will offer):

Under the hood, DI2-ME is a Kubernetes-native solution that builds upon Platform One’s excellent Do-It-Yourself Platform as a Service (PaaS), Big Bang. This makes DI2-ME compliant by default with the DoD Enterprise DevSecOps Reference Design, including a Service Mesh and Sidecar Security Stack, full centralized logging and monitoring, runtime security, and sophisticated network routing. Additionally, it builds on Defense Unicorns’ open-source product Zarf, making it deployable across an air gap as easily as it is to a cloud service provider.

DI2-ME is still rough around the edges in certain areas but has provided mission value to the organizations that are leveraging it. Work is ongoing, and additional open-source contributions are gladly welcomed! Our priority is decreasing the amount of post-deployment configuration needed, with the goal being that our users have full production readiness immediately after deployment. That includes automated backup and restore and full support for Single Sign-On (either username+password+MFA or CAC/SmartCard), plus enough documentation to easily seek an Authorization to Operate (ATO) at whichever impact level or classification that the user needs.

One important note is that we are not trying to absolve DI2-ME users of the need to understand how the various services, software factory tools, Big Bang, or Kubernetes function. We want to make it easier and faster for Kubernetes-native software engineering teams to support software factories using the tools they have to know (and love) rather than removing the need to learn the underlying technologies.

Please come check us out! Feel free to “kick the tires” and let us know what feedback you have. We can be found at:

• The open source repo for the project (there’s an “issues” tab as well as a “discussions” tab for feedback)
• The open-source Kubernetes Slack organization (an invite can be obtained HERE). We’re on the channel called “#zarf”
• Via email at di2me@defenseunicorns.com
• At this year’s Kubecon! We’ll be hard to miss; look for Doug the Unicorn!

More Links for reference:

• Defense Unicorns’ open-source Zarf tool website and GitHub repo
• Platform One’s open-source Big Bang platform
• DI2E’s website (while it is still up)