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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'

#151

Post by FateOfNations »

wbl wrote: post #24
crazygringo wrote: post #19

Normally this might seem like a case of sore loser. But here's the thing: in government it's very important that contracts are awarded on objective merit, because otherwise there's shockingly large opportunity for corruption and favoritism. Billions and billions of dollars of opportunity. And also in this case, Trump's deep antipathy towards Bezos is well-documented, as well as his willingness to use government means…

When the process has costs exceeding the costs of the corruption there is a problem. Look at CA and how Tudor Perini still wins contracts despite a history of failure to deliver and bilking the taxpayer with change orders.

Not necessarily corruption in the traditional sense... We have a law that requires the government to accept the lowest "technically acceptable" bid... Tudor Perini knows how to game this system: Low ball the bid and then make up the difference with change orders later. Everyone else who is honest and submits good faith bids comes in higher and looses.

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

#152

Post by rtkwe »

scottlocklin wrote: post #104
snowwrestler wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yeah I'm aware of how this goes down: in addition to what you say, government management types get their beds feathered by working for the for-profit companies they contract the work to after they "retire" (aka everyone involved in F35 procurement ends up working at Lockheed; total coincidence I am sure). Yet, somehow the NSA manages to run their own data centers[1]. It even looks kind of cost effective! [1] https://…

Part of that may have been the times. That project started construction back in 2011 which means it was in planning for a while before that. The cloud vs on-premises debate was at a different state back then iirc.

Also it's for NSA's questionably legal spying on US citizens vs the more standard legality of DoD's work.

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

#153

Post by TallGuyShort »

bduerst wrote: post #149
TallGuyShort wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's somewhat irrelevant to the question of what people's opinions are of the power the president should have though, isn't it. I'm not defending Trump, I'm saying that D's are currently arguing he shouldn't have power that they would be happy to see exercised if it wasn't an R in office.

Sure, if this had precedence. Would you say illegal actions taken by the president are relevant to whether they should continue to have power? This is the question that non-partisan people are considering.

>> Would you say illegal actions taken by the president are relevant to whether they should continue to have power?

Absolutely and immediately, once convicted, but that hasn't happened. And to emphasize my point about party lines - how much do you want to bet it won't happen?

But let's be clear that my first comment was tongue-in-cheek. I'm not saying the president ACTUALLY has more power depending on the party. I'm saying that things people were fine with under Obama are suddenly a problem under Trump. And I will expect the same thing next time there's a Democrat in office - suddenly Republicans will flip-flop on the way the office is supposed to operate.

edit: Maybe a more appropriate question is, among people who label themselves as "Democrat" and "Republican", who thinks that Trump should lose power after his impeachment, who also thinks that Clinton should have lost power after his impeachment?

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

#154

Post by Diederich »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #109
vasco wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think a lot of this speculation requires inside knowledge of what the DoD's use cases actually are. Are they doing a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking? Are they primarily just doing one of these things? Who knows? There's a lot of cases where having multiple clouds could be fine -- maybe even a big benefit. There's also a lot of cases where it could be a major headache.

> Who knows?

I know a little about it from a previous employer.

Even the narrow slice I saw was all of "a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking", and more.

I think that the internal inefficiencies in the DOD datacenters are so enormous that any kind move to something more 'standardized', no matter what company it is, even with all of the artificial overhead, etc, will likely be a big win.

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

#155

Post by koheripbal »

Miner49er wrote: post #46
koheripbal wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

kick's comment above is absolutely delusional. It's like something a teenager would write. Im starting to wonder if hackernews is turning into Reddit.

From HN guidelines: > Please don't submit comments saying that HN is turning into Reddit. It's a semi-noob illusion, as old as the hills. > Be kind. Don't be snarky. Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. > When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3"…

Point taken, thank you.

...but I am concerned that HN is changing for the worse.

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

#157

Post by ericd »

FateOfNations wrote: post #151
wbl wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the process has costs exceeding the costs of the corruption there is a problem. Look at CA and how Tudor Perini still wins contracts despite a history of failure to deliver and bilking the taxpayer with change orders.

Not necessarily corruption in the traditional sense... We have a law that requires the government to accept the lowest "technically acceptable" bid... Tudor Perini knows how to game this system: Low ball the bid and then make up the difference with change orders later. Everyone else who is honest and submits good faith bids comes in higher and looses.

Then the state AG should go after him for fraud, if it can be shown that he never intended to honor his bid.

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

#158

Post by ericd »

tracker1 wrote: post #44
kick wrote: post #27

This thread is kind of chilling, because everyone within is treating it like it's just chat software or something. With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder. So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or wh…

So, you'd rather we keep spending too much, using too little information, and putting too many innocent people at risk? I mean, it's not like we dropped more ordinance under Obama than every president before him combined, or that the trend didn't decrease by very much after him or anything. Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal…

Do you have a source for that quote about dropped ordnance? I’d be very surprised if he beat out the strategic bombing and artillery shelling of WW2.

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

#160

Post by hopia »

bduerst wrote: post #148
hopia wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Can you elaborate?

Trump attacked Amazon because of business; he seems to think Amazon is profiting from the US taxpayers' money.

Now Amazon has a strong financial incentive to go to court in this case as winning can lead to potentially securing a 10b$ contract. Whereas losing costs maybe some millions?

Both Bezos and Trump are very pragmatic business men. I think this is all just about money.

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