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

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101–110 of 208 posts

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

#101
post #3

Didn't Oracle just sue the DoD claiming they wrote the requirements in such a way that only Amazon could get it?

My view is that Amazon did help write the requirements, and then lost the contract thinking it was in the bag. So now they are taking it to court because they were shocked their in the bag contract wasn't rewarded.

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

#102
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.

Presumably Amazon performs some sort of cost/benefit analysis before suing the federal government.

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

#103
post #29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but in this case, the choice of Azure over AWS was due to government corruption, rather than actual technical diligence.

That is not yet proven. Azure has plenty of other business, so there exist reasons to select it other than corruption. If there wasn’t an openly corrupt president waging a public war with Jeff Bezos there wouldn’t even be the suspicion of this, but given the facts of the man I think Bezos is right to file suit and have it investigated.

If Trump had even a hint of a whiff of a modicum of a crumb of subtlety, he could have gotten a similar result in a way that would preclude such a challenge.

But Trump gonna Trump.

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

#104

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…

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://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utah_Data_Center

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

#105
post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately, the question of how much authority the office has depends on which party currently occupies the office and who's asking.

Yes, I've noticed this too: whenever the party I favor is in office, the office is a lame duck, unable to lift a finger without Congressional approval. Whenever the enemy party is in office, they're absolute tyrants answerable to no-one. This sure is convenient, as it saves me from all kinds of cognitive dissonance!

Uncanny. Do you also find that the morality of a war keeps switching for you?

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

#106

This is standard procedure in these kind of contract fights. I get so sick and tired of government IT contract squabbles. They drag on for years, little usually changes, and, in the meantime the work doesn't get done.

Nothing attracts lawyers like the smell of $10 billion.

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

#107

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…

I understand that the existing approach results in a worse and more expensive product, but doesn't this approach also allow agencies to focus their efforts on assuring the vendors of their critical infrastructure aren't comprimised by bad actors etc...? (This isn't my area expertise, so I'm open to the idea of being super wrong)

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 security to another team. I do not know for a fact, but I am pretty sure the DoD cannot just show up at the AWS or Azure facilities and start auditing them (maybe they can and it is in a contract, someone else might know).

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

#109
post #95
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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.

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

#110

This is standard procedure in these kind of contract fights. I get so sick and tired of government IT contract squabbles. They drag on for years, little usually changes, and, in the meantime the work doesn't get done.

This could be genius if the rates are locked in.

1) Price services at current rates today.

2) Delay usage for 4 years until everything costs half as much.

3) Profit $$$

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