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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'

#131

Post by syshum »

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.

>>DoD's use cases actually are.

We all saw T3, we know it is skynet

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

#132

Post by cferr »

shadowgovt wrote: post #11
CrankyBear wrote: post #9

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.

I'm not sure how standard procedure it is for the President to intervene in a down-the-chain contract decision though.

Well, he is head of the executive branch which the DoD falls under. He can issue whatever order he wants. It's up to the court to decide if they are/were lawful. SOP doesn't mean a whole lot here.

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

#133

Post by Rebelgecko »

psv1 wrote: post #40
reallydontask wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

is there any evidence backing this?

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

It's a $10 billion contract. It makes sense for Amazon (financially) to protest even if they think there's only a 1% chance that they eventually win.

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

#134

Post by wenc »

phreack wrote: post #113
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…

Here's a talk by someone who worked on software for the military, that echoes some of your feelings from an inside perspective. https://www.calebthompson.io/talks/dont-get-distracted/

Interesting thoughts. I wonder if anyone here has heard of the Principle of Double Effect? [1]

On one hand, we need to be thoughtful and mindful of the ethical implications of all that we do. On the other hand, every action always has a context inside a larger system and has unintended consequences and being an ethical purist can sometimes be more harmful. Most people who are older fall somewhere between striving to do the right thing but also recognizing they cannot control all the consequences and even if they could, they cannot predict what greater harm or good may result.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect

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

#135

Post by shadowgovt »

cferr wrote: post #132
shadowgovt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how standard procedure it is for the President to intervene in a down-the-chain contract decision though.

Well, he is head of the executive branch which the DoD falls under. He can issue whatever order he wants. It's up to the court to decide if they are/were lawful. SOP doesn't mean a whole lot here.

SOP doesn't constrain his options, but it makes one wonder why intervention was needed if it's unusual and it occurs.

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

#136

Post by shadowgovt »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #22
shadowgovt wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how standard procedure it is for the President to intervene in a down-the-chain contract decision though.

The question shouldn't be whether it's standard, but if the office has the authority to intervene. You can then work backwards to legislative hot fixes to governance deficiencies.

Both questions are interesting for different reasons.

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

#137

Post by unishark »

FpUser wrote: post #99
corporate_shi11 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's also a lot of middle ground between a "point of view", by which I assume you mean interests which are not justifiable defense, and behavior so beyond the pale you'd want to melt an entire city to prevent it. Particularly since the pollution and lingering health effects of nukes are so unacceptable compared to conventional alternatives.

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

#138

Post by tpetry »

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.

And that is the reason Red Hat is making so much money: Whether it is free or not is not relevant but that you can pay a vendor who will fix your problems in production

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

#139

Post by aianus »

FpUser wrote: post #117
corporate_shi11 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reality is such that militaries are necessary both for self defense and defense of the weak and vulnerable. The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence. Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country e…

I prefer that to be a UN. This "ensured piece and prosperity" - you can try to explain it to a Middle East, Vietnam etc.

Vietnamese are friendly to Americans and see America as an ally in their struggle against Chinese imperialism. The hatred of China in Vietnam is near-universal and explicit.

I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.

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

#140

Post by bduerst »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #129
sehugg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether or not the occupant has just been impeached for leveraging public assets against political enemies seems to also be a relevant factor.

Even that seems to 100% be prior party lines anyway.

>Even that seems to 100% be prior party lines anyway.

The non-partisan GAO seems to disagree: https://apnews.com/9127109f325778490fd40c5f98be1817

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