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

Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

propublica.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 249 posts

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#191

Post by jiggawatts »

jonnycoder wrote: post #121
anonymsft318 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a Microsoftie of more than a decade... Yeah, I see this. We have an internal system called Cosmos[0] that does a great job of processing huge quantities of data very fast. And we sat on it for years while the rest of the industry moved to Spark and its derivatives. We finally released it as Azure Data Lake Analytics (ADLA) but did a shit job of supporting/promoting it. We built Synapse, and it's garbage. We've now…

Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too. I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.

You’ve made a fundamental mistake and you’ll have the same result from every cloud provider.

You’re using a legacy v3 series that is being removed from the data centres in an era where you could be using v6 or newer instances that are being freshly deployed and are readily available.

If you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on these absolute basics, you’re going to have a rough time with any public cloud, no matter their logo design.

Right now you're paying more for less compute and having to deal with low availability too! Go read the docs and catch up to the last decade of virtual hardware changes.

Or, just run this and pick a size:

    Get-AzBatchSupportedVMSku -Location 'centralus' | `
    ? Name -like 'Standard_E*v[67]'

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#192

Post by ContDestroyer »

Hizonner wrote: post #173
ContDestroyer wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope neither the public entity nor the private corporation... it should be the market. WE decide with our business who is worthy, or not. Nice try, comrade!

Fascinating. Enlighten me further. How exactly will "the market" decide where the government, or a corporation, or even an individual, chooses to buy computing services? I'm very stupid, so you're going to have to explain step by step exactly how "the market" will do this. I mean, here I thought that choices like that were the inputs to the market. Let's do it for the corporations first. I'm Microsoft. I need the mar…

You're right that corporations and individuals make those choices... that's exactly my point. Microsoft's procurement team evaluating motherboard vendors is the market working. What I'm saying is that process produces better outcomes than a government agency mandating which cloud provider everyone uses. The problem isn't who makes the choice, it's when the choice gets made for you.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#194

Post by Hizonner »

ContDestroyer wrote: post #192
Hizonner wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fascinating. Enlighten me further. How exactly will "the market" decide where the government, or a corporation, or even an individual, chooses to buy computing services? I'm very stupid, so you're going to have to explain step by step exactly how "the market" will do this. I mean, here I thought that choices like that were the inputs to the market. Let's do it for the corporations first. I'm Microsoft. I need the mar…

You're right that corporations and individuals make those choices... that's exactly my point. Microsoft's procurement team evaluating motherboard vendors is the market working. What I'm saying is that process produces better outcomes than a government agency mandating which cloud provider everyone uses. The problem isn't who makes the choice, it's when the choice gets made for you.

Gee, that's nice, but in this case they were deciding which cloud provider the government itself was going to use, not what provider you could use.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#195

Post by jiggawatts »

gertrunde wrote: post #16

It's not very clear from the article, but I get the feeling from the context that the 'pile of shit' quote referenced the package of documentation about the service rather than the service itself. (That seems to be the main complaint, that Microsoft never provided the clear information required to conduct the assessment properly).

That’s a perfectly valid reason to reject a security solution, and is one of my top complaints about Microsoft in this decade.

They fired all of their technical documenters, so their security critical systems, APIs, tools, and SDKs now have only auto-generated docs that are just the function names with spaces added between the words.

Like this:

    Overrides the authorization for an identity.

    AuthorizationOveride( string identity );
Good luck figuring out what anything important to your own security does, how it works, and what the consequences of small configuration changes might be.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#196

Post by cyberax »

bmurphy1976 wrote: post #61
everdrive wrote: post #51

The experts were correct. Azure is the biggest pile of shit I've ever had to work with. Everything feels evolutionary. In other words, a new product in azure is barely a product at all, but a small appendage which totally inherits a bunch of preexisting Azure "stuff." And all this preexisting stuff may not really make sense for the product, and it might inherit stuff that makes the product much worse. But, it doesn't…

How is this different than Amazon? Same problem there. Oh, you're using this new service? Need to view the logs? Want a nice friendly UI to do that? Fuck you here's Cloudwatch. Good luck. Just to be clear, I'm responding to the parent comment not the article.

[flagged]

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#197

Post by jiggawatts »

kajecounterhack wrote: post #190

+10000 that Azure is a steaming pile of shit. Like what's this -- `azcopy` broken at head, and the working one doesn't guarantee correctness after a copy (99.6% copied successfully! good luck figuring out what went wrong!) compare that to migrating data with GCS or S3 -- they provide first class tools that do it right quickly (aws-cli, gsutil). Want a VM? You'll also need this network security group, network interfac…

Azcopy is special bad, the team that looks after it is made up entirely of junior developers that obstinately refuse to listen to feedback.

Its documentation title is "Copy or move data to Azure Storage by using AzCopy v10" but it can’t actually do trivial operations like “move” because the devs are too scared to write code that deletes files: https://github.com/Azure/azure-storage-azcopy/issues/1650#is...

I recommend switching to “rclone” instead to avoid the frustration. It won't fill your entire system disk up with unnecessary log files unlike azcopy, which is a significant source of production server outages where I work because of this default behaviour.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#199

Post by cuuupid »

jbombadil wrote: post #5

> [...]And because federal agencies were allowed to deploy the product during the review, GCC High spread across the government as well as the defense industry. By late 2024, FedRAMP reviewers concluded that they had little choice but to authorize the technology — not because their questions had been answered or their review was complete, but largely on the grounds that Microsoft’s product was already being used acro…

> Not criticizing FedRAMP

Think it's very important to criticize FedRAMP. The FedRAMP board is extremely slow moving and continuously disregards industry feedback. As a result, FedRAMP is essentially a Palantir tax, where nearly every startup hoping to sell to government (including larger ones like Anthropic, xAI, Cognition AND OpenAI) is forced to pay Palantir to deploy in their FedRAMP enclave. This has a sticker price of 200-500k/y before we get into compute premiums.

Going through FedRAMP yourself requires a staff who is willing to put in a dedicated effort on the compliance paperwork (not the controls, which you could knock out in ~1mo easily, just the paperwork) for 6-8mo before getting into a line to hopefully get a 3PAO audit and then remediations followed by another audit which is followed by needing to get agency sponsorship for a FedRAMP board review. This costs $2-3M minimum including the amount of security software needed for evidencing and policy, which rules out nearly every small business. This process also can easily take 2-3 years of waiting, which forces out enterprise. So anyone entering the ecosystem is essentially forced to pay Palantir (or 2F which is a distant 2nd) a tax that is entirely enforced by government regulation.

They are not any kind of 'Federal Cyber Experts' either as that work is primarily outsourced to Schellman etc.

Re: Despite doubts, federal cyber experts approved Microsoft cloud service

#200

Post by jonnycoder »

jiggawatts wrote: post #191
jonnycoder wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their support team likes to sit on things for a while too. I'm on day 4 of waiting for Azure to approve my support request to increase Azure Batch vCPUs from default of 4 to 20 for ESv3 series. I signed up last week and converted to a paid account. I'm going to use Google Cloud Batch today instead.

You’ve made a fundamental mistake and you’ll have the same result from every cloud provider. You’re using a legacy v3 series that is being removed from the data centres in an era where you could be using v6 or newer instances that are being freshly deployed and are readily available. If you can’t be bothered to keep an eye on these absolute basics, you’re going to have a rough time with any public cloud, no matter th…

Thanks I will try that!
Post reply on HN