Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thehill.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 208 posts

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

#181

Post by therockspush »

rzmnzm wrote: post #145
bob1029 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 admini…

As Microsoft is proud to boast, the majority on instances on Azure are Linux based. The tooling that matters to me (az cli, terraform, vscode, kubectl et all) runs absolutely fine on Azure. I use Linux to create and manage Linux and open source infra on azure every day. The majority of complaints I hear about azure tend to revolve around their AzureRM templating, which is admittedly terrible, but irrelevant since ter…

Looking at my resources globally is easier in Azure as well. Having to click on each region in AWS to see all my instances makes my head hurt.

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

#182

Post by xoa »

crystaldev wrote: post #53
psv1 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's enough evidence for Amazon to take legal action. Then the courts decide if it's good enough.

So you mean zero, right? There's no evidence benchmark for a party taking legal action in a civil matter. Saying "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" doesn't strengthen an argument.

>So you mean zero, right? There's no evidence benchmark for a party taking legal action in a civil matter. Saying "you'll be hearing from my lawyer" doesn't strengthen an argument.

In the United States and other common-law legal systems (I don't know about other codes at all) there is the concept of "summary judgement", which would absolutely be invoked if Amazon presented no "no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law" [1]. A summary judgement can be sought with full evidentiary presentation. Amazon's evidence may well be weak, but if they presented "zero evidence" the case wouldn't go to trial at all. It's perfectly reasonable to expect and assume a certain basic level of competence from an established megacorp's legal team. They will have filed a cause of action to which they could at least potentially be entitled relief and assertions of material facts that a jury could at least potentially be convinced by.

----

1: "Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure", https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56

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

#183

Post by mcqueenjordan »

castlecrasher2 wrote: post #130
psv1 wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, > "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win" this simply isn't what I said. Second - my evidence ? We're not in court and I'm not trying to prove anything to you. I just explained my thought process - if you disagree or if you think there's a flaw in my reasoning, you can point it out. Or you can move on and ignore what I've written.

>Or you can move on and ignore what I've written. I tend to have discussions with people online to understand their point of view. Will you indulge me and share why you think there's merit to the case or is this thread just another pair of soapboxes where we each squawk from our megaphones and leave without mutual understanding?

[Disclaimer: I currently work for AWS.]

Let's establish as true a pretty important prior:

1. Anyone who has rightfully-obtained access or knowledge of any such evidence is most likely obligated (legally or otherwise) to keep it secret.

Given #1, asking for evidence isn't the most salient question. Since it can really only be speculation, the most interesting questions probably start with "Given what we know, what is most likely?"

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

#184

Post by topkai22 »

mrep wrote: post #118
siffland wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can lock down YOUR infrastructure, but then are 100% dependent on the cloud environment to maintain and patch theirs. Since you have no insight to what the underlying infrastructure consists of you really have no way of knowing if they are secure. Do their storage arrays have open CVE's? are they employing people who are mentally sane? You just need to trust them. So in the cloud just migrates the a lot of the se…

Considering AWS already has 2 entire airgapped dataceters for the US government, I'm pretty sure this contract will entail microsoft building entirely separate airgapped datacenters for the DOD and thus they probably will be able to just show up to their datacenter because nobody else is going to be running anything in those datacenters.

Correct, but those air gapped data centers already exist- there are separate Azure regions for certain restricted civilian government workloads, DoD unclassified work, and cleared work.

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

#185

Post by TallGuyShort »

shadowgovt wrote: post #178
TallGuyShort wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's my whole point. Increasingly, people's idea of the rule of law is their subjective opinion of this person . Trump could have been impeached for the exact same offense, and 99% of people opinions of what should happen next wouldn't change.

I believe if Trump were impeached for the same offense, with the same fact pattern, your assertion is not true. The offenses and fact patterns in question are quite different in these two cases.

So you think the majority-Republican Senate might actually convict?

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

#186

Post by joejerryronnie »

Answerawake wrote: post #162
BareNakedCoder wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not just governments. I worked at a F100 company that had a special type of internal funding called SQP for spending on (mostly) IT people-hours on projects. Year after year, the biz would penny-pinch on their SQP to the point that we struggled to keep core contractors on staff. Then around Oct/Nov, biz would come to us begging to spend their SQP on anything (else they could lose it next year) as long as that project…

We are always seeing threads with junior people/new grads talking about how they are having so much trouble breaking into the industry. Just hire them and give them interesting tiny projects. Would be super helpful to so many people to get going and still allow you to spend all your money.

You can't ramp up hiring that quickly. By the time you've onboarded several new devs, the year (and budget period) will be over.

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

#187

Post by tracker1 »

kec wrote: post #180
tracker1 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you miss the part where I specifically said, "Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced."

I didn't, I was trying to point out that the unintended and inevitable outcome of making war cheaper to wage (either in dollars or lives of your own soldiers) is more war.

As if cost is actually a deterrent for war...

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

#188

Post by unishark »

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…

> Presidents aren't kings

No they're elected, which rather complicates the point you're trying to make here. In a representative democracy, the voters speak through their representatives. That is your democracy. Courts would be undemocratic when they intervene based on a "higher" authority (like constitutional rules no one voted for). Not saying it is a bad thing, voters can be dumb and a good code of rules would be better to the degree it is upheld.

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

#189

Post by kec »

tracker1 wrote: post #187
kec wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't, I was trying to point out that the unintended and inevitable outcome of making war cheaper to wage (either in dollars or lives of your own soldiers) is more war.

As if cost is actually a deterrent for war...

It certainly is, compare Vietnam to Iraq. If LBJ and Nixon had predator drones we never would have left.

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

#190

Post by bsenftner »

jessemillar wrote: post #88
bsenftner wrote: post #75

"The cloud" is such a scam - of course a "war cloud" - why not, just triple the security billing invoice and collect obscene cash and power. Every sucker buys into "the cloud" when running a server yourself is elementary. We are doomed.

One server is elementary, yes, but hundreds of thousands working together is an entirely different beast. There’s nothing easy about cloud computing and there’s a definite reason why it’s worth buying into.

> "There’s nothing easy about cloud computing"

There's the deceptive mantra repeated mindlessly over and over, yet again. And there is nothing hard either. It is just complex. So everyone mindlessly pays too much because some marketing has successfully sold them that this is "too hard".

Post reply on HN