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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'

#161

Post by huzaif »

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…

Majority of our issues with Azure revolve around some of their services, which are still slow to evolve, due to their pre-cloud underpinnings.

An example of such service is their Azure AD B2C service, which is their competitor to AWS cognito. We have been using it and as a baseline login service, and it works fine. However, the service doesn't see much upgrades. Their "user flow" templates, which control the logon process, have been in preview for years.

Yes, Identity Server 4 exists but it would be nice to have decent competitors to Spot Fleets, ECS, Cognito, etc.

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

#162

Post by Answerawake »

BareNakedCoder wrote: post #114
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…

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.

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

#163

Post by throwaway23954 »

hopia wrote: post #160
bduerst wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you really thing Trump dislikes Bezos because of "profiting from the US taxpayer" instead of "owning The Washington Post", I don't even know what to say.

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

#164

Post by shadowgovt »

TallGuyShort wrote: post #153
bduerst wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison since one of them was impeached for lying to a grand jury (about a topic that was outside the scope of the investigation and more than a little irrelevant to any questions of high crimes and misdemeanors) and another was impeached for abuse of the power of his office to solicit aid from a foreign country in collecting damaging information on a political rival.

Intent and outcomes matter if the question is "Should this person lose power?"

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

#165

Post by enraged_camel »

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.

It is quite clear whether Trump's interference constituted foul play. Everyone who has been paying attention understands very well that he is motivated strongly and solely by his enmity of and hatred towards Bezos.

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

#166

Post by blaser-waffle »

mtberatwork wrote: post #128
sysadmindotfail wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a former longtime contractor I totally agree. One thing often overlooked is this 'Silver Tsunami' that will wreak havoc on the old guard (existing giant contracting companies). The existing workforce is aging, the new blood is uninterested in the old ways (cruft, old tech) and frankly there's tremendous opportunity for a 'Space-X' style small contractor to get a serious foothold. Some of these companies need to re…

> there's tremendous opportunity for a 'Space-X' style small contractor to get a serious foothold. Sure, but the procurement process is incredibly difficult to crack into for small companies. There is tremendous amounts of red tape designed to keep other players out. > Some of these companies need to replace 40% of their workforce in the next decade. Who would a new grad choose? Most will go to where the money is...u…

> Most will go to where the money is...unless you go FAANG, it's harder to find the kind of high salaries that defense contractors can throw around in the private sector.

There is a reason the DC suburbs of Northern VA and Southern MD have some of the richest counties in the US...

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

#167

Post by FpUser »

ericd wrote: post #157
FateOfNations wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They had, and they've won: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tutor_Perini

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

#168

Post by TallGuyShort »

shadowgovt wrote: post #164
TallGuyShort wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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…

It's a bit of an apples to oranges comparison since one of them was impeached for lying to a grand jury (about a topic that was outside the scope of the investigation and more than a little irrelevant to any questions of high crimes and misdemeanors) and another was impeached for abuse of the power of his office to solicit aid from a foreign country in collecting damaging information on a political rival. Intent and…

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.

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

#169

Post by SamReidHughes »

godelzilla wrote: post #142
SamReidHughes wrote: post #108

It is strange to me that there are even rules about this. Imagine if we decided to halt the Manhattan Project for a few months so the courts could work out whether contracts were properly awarded.

Millions of people might not have died unnecessarily. The horror!

Nukes only killed a couple hundred thousand.

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

#170

Post by FpUser »

unishark wrote: post #137
FpUser wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Somehow I do not notice middle ground. All I see is the overwhelming force present virtually everywhere you can point your finger on the map bar couple of places where the US dares not to go. Meanwhile I think even with 1/10th of it current force the US can surely defend its territory and citizens. I agree about pollution: depleted uranium and agent orange for example are way more preferable then the alternative.
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