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I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amaz

I don't get all of the Amazon fan-boi-ism. They are just another company. They are all trying to get more of the publics money through influence. You think Amazon hasn't been lobbying agencies and congress to get their business? Why do you think that Bezos bought the Washington Post? Oracle is quite bad. Procurement in the Government is broken. The DOD is the worst. It's literally a give away to the private sector. If you think that someone "wins" this kind of business because their "product" "is the best"...You are going to be very sad.

manigandham 9y ago
And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.
- haimez 9y ago
  Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest. Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority. They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
- youdontknowtho 9y ago
  Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude. I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it. The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.
rdl 9y ago
Amazon is sometimes less than perfect, but they operate in hypercompetitive markets where customers can easily switch away. This builds an entirely different kind of company than an Oracle or a big defense contractor. Fundamentally CIA and DOD cloud requirements aren't that different from large existing AWS workloads so it's nearly the existing COTS product. (There's a bit of security on top, some of which is better in commercial AWS than in most locked-down S/TS environments already, some of which can be retrofitted onto AWS easily, and much of which is just policy, but the rest of the product is basically already fine.) I would trust an arbitrary product which competes on the marketplace and is sold into government on a COTS basis more than virtually anything arising out of government/vendor insanity. (I'd probably go with a purely-Government solution if it were a really specialized thing and of small enough scale, developed organically by the end user org, more than a traditional procurement thing, but COTS generally is the winner whenever a COTS option exists.)
- youdontknowtho 9y ago
  If you think that Amazon got where it has in government because of competition, I have a bridge to sell you. That's not how business is done in the public sector. It's just not. Years of legislation have built massive systems of patronage that must be satisfied no matter what service or system you provide. "Trust a product"...that's part of the problem right there. Why do we have to trust them? It's just weird how emotion becomes part of this. I'm not trying to single you out or anything. I do it too, reflexively. I guess my point is that the only difference between Oracle and Amazon are some letters in the name and some circumstances. If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same way under a different set of circumstances, then you are going to be let down. Maybe I'm just rambling...I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the IT industry and American business in general. It's all just so incredibly short sighted.
  - rdl 9y ago
    Amazon got where it is in the general marketplace by building winning products. It then used that incumbency to be the obvious choice to expand into the public sector, competing with largely incompetent companies. It's the same thing when USG buys efficient, highly-optimized products like, say, regular pickup trucks polarises and such for fleets, rather than paying LockMart/NG/Boeing/BAE to build them a custom "non-tactical advanced transport device".
mrep 9y ago
To me, amazon has earned a reputation for being extremely customer friendly, consistently working to drive down prices, and funneling all of their cash flows into R&D/growth. Idk about you, but those are probably the top 3 attributes I want in a company that manages my infrastructure.
- youdontknowtho 9y ago
  If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same manner under different circumstances, you are in for a let down. They are a business, Oracle is doing what's "right for their shareholders". They all behave this way.
  - mrep 9y ago
    Sorry, I should have clarified but I was responding to the “Amazon fan-boi-ism” point. What “manner” are you talking about?

manigandham 9y ago

And yet, understanding all the politics involved, I would much rather have the government using AWS because I want them to have functioning infrastructure and services which will only benefit the public.

haimez 9y ago
Maybe they should look at Google cloud then. Oh, they already are. Disclosure: I DON'T work for Google cloud, it's just a better product.
- manigandham 9y ago
  It's not that simple. We are primarily on the Google cloud as well and while they have better primitives (VMs + networking + IAM + account management), they are worse than AWS at the rest. Very few and weak managed service offerings, APIs are mostly in beta, SDKs and libraries are in alpha, support is overly sensitive, often wrong, and will take days to reply unless you select P1 priority. They are the best if you only need strong IaaS or run on GKE, otherwise AWS is literally turn-key to run your business with every imaginable product available.
youdontknowtho 9y ago
Oh my god. I get it. You like Amazon. Sorry, I'm just more cynical than I think allows me to be polite at times. I'm really not trying to be rude. I don't know what to say buddy. I wish it mattered. It doesn't. It just doesn't. They will all get a slice of the pie. They all do the lawsuit and contract BS dance. Some of them are better at PR than others. Some of them currently, and in the past, have made so much money, and have so captured the segment of government that they sell to, that they couldn't give a rat's a what you think. Oh, and you can't do anything about it. So, maybe feeling emotionally invested in who get's to run the virtual machines is one way of dealing with it. The only fix for this is more participation in government...like I said...I'm a pessimist.

rdl 9y ago

Amazon is sometimes less than perfect, but they operate in hypercompetitive markets where customers can easily switch away. This builds an entirely different kind of company than an Oracle or a big defense contractor. Fundamentally CIA and DOD cloud requirements aren't that different from large existing AWS workloads so it's nearly the existing COTS product. (There's a bit of security on top, some of which is better in commercial AWS than in most locked-down S/TS environments already, some of which can be retrofitted onto AWS easily, and much of which is just policy, but the rest of the product is basically already fine.) I would trust an arbitrary product which competes on the marketplace and is sold into government on a COTS basis more than virtually anything arising out of government/vendor insanity. (I'd probably go with a purely-Government solution if it were a really specialized thing and of small enough scale, developed organically by the end user org, more than a traditional procurement thing, but COTS generally is the winner whenever a COTS option exists.)

youdontknowtho 9y ago
If you think that Amazon got where it has in government because of competition, I have a bridge to sell you. That's not how business is done in the public sector. It's just not. Years of legislation have built massive systems of patronage that must be satisfied no matter what service or system you provide. "Trust a product"...that's part of the problem right there. Why do we have to trust them? It's just weird how emotion becomes part of this. I'm not trying to single you out or anything. I do it too, reflexively. I guess my point is that the only difference between Oracle and Amazon are some letters in the name and some circumstances. If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same way under a different set of circumstances, then you are going to be let down. Maybe I'm just rambling...I'm pretty pessimistic about the state of the IT industry and American business in general. It's all just so incredibly short sighted.
- rdl 9y ago
  Amazon got where it is in the general marketplace by building winning products. It then used that incumbency to be the obvious choice to expand into the public sector, competing with largely incompetent companies. It's the same thing when USG buys efficient, highly-optimized products like, say, regular pickup trucks polarises and such for fleets, rather than paying LockMart/NG/Boeing/BAE to build them a custom "non-tactical advanced transport device".

mrep 9y ago

To me, amazon has earned a reputation for being extremely customer friendly, consistently working to drive down prices, and funneling all of their cash flows into R&D/growth. Idk about you, but those are probably the top 3 attributes I want in a company that manages my infrastructure.

youdontknowtho 9y ago
If you think that Amazon won't behave in exactly the same manner under different circumstances, you are in for a let down. They are a business, Oracle is doing what's "right for their shareholders". They all behave this way.
- mrep 9y ago
  Sorry, I should have clarified but I was responding to the “Amazon fan-boi-ism” point. What “manner” are you talking about?