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Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

thehill.com

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Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#91

Post by arwineap »

siffland wrote: post #43

After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…

> how did we buy 2 extra $50k Cisco chassis and then keep them in storage for 3 years

Military budgets... Spend it or lose it.

It's better you find spare cisco chassis, than hundreds of zip disks or obsolete laptops >.>

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#92

Post by psv1 »

crystaldev wrote: post #81
psv1 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know what evidence they have. Not sure why you decided that it's zero.

I decided based on your statement: > There's enough evidence for Amazon to take legal action. The "enough" here is zero. They may have more, but you argued for at least zero.

> The "enough" here is zero.

No, it isn't. Legally it might be zero, but multi-billion dollar companies don't enter legal processes that last years and cost them millions just for the sake of it. This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#93

Post by bob1029 »

nova22033 wrote: post #67

Is there an objective case for why Azure is better than AWS?

If you are a purely-Microsoft shop (AD/Exchange/Visual Studio), using Azure could give you better integration within their ecosystem (i.e. native Azure tooling within Visual Studio). I realize AWS has similar tools and plugins, but there is something nice to having first-party support down the entire vertical. Making your Microsoft account rep responsible for everything really does help to consolidate business administration concerns.

If you are not a Microsoft shop (i.e. >50% of your stuff runs on Linux), I would almost say avoid Azure because of how focused it is on their stack. I know you can run arbitrary Linux on Azure and generally get everything done, but AWS (and all other non-Microsoft cloud vendors) always seemed more friendly/cheaper for non-Windows/Office concerns.

So, it's not just about the cloud platforms and their respective costs per feature consumption unit. It's also about your business and the ecosystem required to support and operate within these cloud platforms.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#94

Post by hopia »

psv1 wrote: post #42
zip1234 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that no matter which company is selected.

Actually, only one of these companies has had its CEO personally attacked by the president.

It's all just business, as is this case.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#95

Post by vasco »

derefr wrote: post #74
siffland wrote: post #43

After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…

> We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. I mean, if you’ve already budgeted the CapEx for some additional Oracle licenses, the OpEx efficiencies of having unified tooling and a unified ops doctrine are no joke. I haven’t worked with an Oracle DBMS, but I think this is analogous: I’d sure hate to have to manage a cloud infrastructure where parts were on AWS,…

Even with an abstraction layer like kubernetes you still have a lot of duplicate work if you're multi-cloud. Services need to be exposed with load balancers, and those will have different configurations to be setup. Same with any Volumes. And then you have platform updates on both sides, bugs, quirks. plus the maintenance and upkeep of two clouds - two bills to inspect, two account managers to deal with, two sets of permissions and overall account configuration to setup, maintain and audit. Multi-cloud is really a set of requirements that changes the whole game in terms of operational overhead. And we limited our example to kubernetes. I imagine any non-fictional-for-the-sake-of-example company would want to make use of other platform specific tools as you mention.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#96

Post by siffland »

arwineap wrote: post #91
siffland wrote: post #43

After 15 years of being a DoD contractor, it is frustrating to see yet another sole source entity getting the contract. Prices will inflate and there is no competition. HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought…

> how did we buy 2 extra $50k Cisco chassis and then keep them in storage for 3 years Military budgets... Spend it or lose it. It's better you find spare cisco chassis, than hundreds of zip disks or obsolete laptops >.>

This was an accident, they meant to buy 2 blades for more SAN ports and they ordered the wrong parts.

They did this with a few database servers as well, they were supposed to order 8 core processors, but they ordered 10 core instead (it was a typo), they had 4 processors per machine it was a $40k extra mess not including the extra Oracle licenses needed to buy since Oracle licenses by cores (8 extra cores per machine and 3 machines).

But i do understand the spend it or lose it, which is another reason no one tries to be efficient.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#97

Post by snowwrestler »

scottlocklin wrote: post #87

Why can't the government run its own computers? I mean, shouldn't it?

The federal government cannot compete with private industry salaries and benefits for rare technical talent because of caps on federal salaries. Federal salaries are capped because attacking "government waste" and "lazy overpaid government workers" is popular with politicians and the electorate.

So instead the government outsources technical projects to private contractors... which means ultimately the government is paying those big salaries, and the profit margin on top of them.

One of many many "penny wise / pound foolish" problems with the way we do government services.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#99

Post by FpUser »

corporate_shi11 wrote: post #62
james-mcelwain wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a huge, gigantic difference between not having a military at all and spending 1 trillion a year to be an imperialist superpower. It's almost like... there's a middle ground.

The US is not imperialistic, that's just a cute talking point. That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point. However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different…

The US has nukes. Nobody's ever going to attack it directly. Why do you need overwhelming military dominance in conventional forces then? I suspect it has something to do with being able to force point of view by having big stick available to back it up.

Re: Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'

#100

Post by arwineap »

jandrese wrote: post #90
kick wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I checked, Torvalds wasn't getting billions of dollars from the DoD to install Linux on servers. That's a false comparison, and a lazy one at that.

Almost every government lab I've seen has a rule that says you aren't allowed to use free software in the lab. Everything was supposed to have a vendor that was responsible for it that you were paying. Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.

That's interesting...

We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good.

This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.

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