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Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

defenseone.com

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Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#31

Post by joncrane »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

It's basically an attempt to sole-source a contract while pretending to be an open competition.

Having said that, AWS may realistically be the only provider that can meet their needs.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#32

Post by anoncoward111 »

aviraldg wrote: post #22
eli wrote: post #12

I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...

Lost me at the first line: "Jeff Bezos is one of President Donald Trump’s biggest critics." How do Jeff's political opinions affect AWS' suitability as a cloud service provider in any way?

It doesn't, but this is the US we're talking about. Thinge get shady here.

Trump is the President and theoretically can call the shots at the Pentagon if he wants to. Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, which, despite having the most popular service, is a company that Trump doesn't like.

Oracle has spent probably billions at this point over the decades lobbying Washington. Safra is working very hard to pull strings to keep this contract in the good ol' boy network, considering the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each and every major branch of government spends on Oracle stuff every year.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#33

Post by dastbe »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

Ruggedized is a real word, though. Googling it at the moment gets you definitions and links to laptops, tents, hardware firewalls, etc.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#34

Post by Eridrus »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

It's Oracle. Safra is super close to the administration [1]. The only reason this contract is out of the hands of Booz Allen et al is Oracle. This might be the worst-kept tech secret in D.C. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-tea...

Oracle was my first guess too, but this isn't exactly proof either.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#35

Post by Spooky23 »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

1% of Amazon/Google/Microsoft's bottom line is a metric shit-ton of money.

It's also, more importantly, opening the door to new markets like banking, insurance and state/local government. Many compute intensive workloads in state/local government remain on-prem beacuse of the lack of Federal guidance, which means higher compliance risk.

Silicon Valley drives innovation, but the federal government drives implementation of technology.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#36

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #2

It's Oracle. Safra is super close to the administration [1]. The only reason this contract is out of the hands of Booz Allen et al is Oracle. This might be the worst-kept tech secret in D.C. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-tea...

Or course it's Oracle. Given how much of the rest of the US government they have by the short hairs, they're desperately trying to legitimize their last-horse entry into cloud computing by leveraging existing relationships as hard as possible.

I don't need a 100-page dossier to see that, even from here in the midwest.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#37

Post by Spooky23 »

nbevans wrote: post #8

Looking at Oracle's website, after getting past the hilarious Cookies Policy modal prompt, you really wouldn't think they were genuinely in the cloud business. It just looks like sales fodder with no substance behind it.

They are very much in the cloud business. Oracle salesfolk are essentially not compensated for selling things other than cloud services.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#38

Post by sidlls »

ohthehugemanate wrote: post #14

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirement…

This isn't accidental. Despite all the rules about fair awarding of contracts it's mostly ceremony: the government agents who draft it have a contractor or small set of them in mind when they draft the proposal. It's the same thing that happens when a hiring manager wants to bring a friend in: they'll write the job description such that only their friend qualifies, while wording it in such a way as to give some cover.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#39

Post by ocdtrekkie »

I suspect the winner will end up being the company with the least morals.

Google is likely already out of the running; between Maven and Dragonfly, the Pentagon has to be aware that there's no commitment they can make that doesn't come with an "if our employees don't revolt over it" asterisk. Given the questionable crud our defense department gets into, they'd probably want to avoid that condition at all expenses.

Microsoft probably wouldn't be too far behind on that train, I've seen some Microsoft folks upset about some their projects too. Not sure about Amazon, have we heard about upset Amazon employees on a cloud project yet? Oracle has never been too ashamed to play the villain, so I'm sure they'd be willing to do whatever the Pentagon wants.

And as a sidebar, single-sourcing all cloud services for the department of defense is still a dumb idea.

Re: Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

#40

Post by sharms »

There is another side of this, which is workforce training and capabilities. As much as AWS / Azure / GCP are alike, their services and behaviors are very different at a detailed level of overview, requiring separate tooling and best practices. I could see someone wanting to procure a specific cloud vendor as their toolsets already support this.
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