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It’s Amazon’s Swamp Now
- the-pigeon 8y ago"without the guy in the White House even batting an eye." Do they not read Trump's Twitter? He's complained about Amazon and Bezos a ton.
- justicezyx 8y agoTurns out Oracle's complaints do have merits, contrary to normal emotional responses.
- fipple 8y agoA $2 billion minimum size for a vendor getting a $10 billion contract is perfectly reasonable.
- bilbo0s 8y agoMore than reasonable. Not awarding the contract to an organization with the requisite scale would be cause for investigating the process. In my mind, the likelihood is that people would complain no matter who got this contract. If it went to Microsoft, the article would be about all the high ranking contacts between Microsoft and the Pentagon. As a pragmatic matter, any organization with the expertise and scale to realistically execute this contract will have deep connections with the Pentagon. At several levels.
- Cthulhu_ 8y agoYup, and same with Google, with the extra spookiness that has been surrounding Google for a while. And Facebook, but then there'd be a riot.
- nova22033 8y agoThis is a bad article. Is there any other cloud provider who has a cloud offering certified to hold top secret/secret data?
- Analemma_ 8y agoAzure is certified for Secret data, but not Top Secret AFAIK.
- conanbatt 8y agoIs Bottom Secret more secret or less secret that Top Secret?
- JimmyAustin 8y agoLess.
- tschwimmer 8y agoDon't get me started on the requirements for Charm and Strange secret!
- xivzgrev 8y agoAnd is top secret more or less secret than double secret probation? https://youtu.be/1tfK_3XK4CI https://youtu.be/1tfK_3XK4CI
- bsder 8y agoYou are not cleared for that information, citizen. Please report to Section 9A-Q for termination.
- youdontknowtho 8y agoThis is a bad article. I'm a fan and I don't like my favorite defense contractor maligned? Get a grip. This is Amazon trying to engineer a permanent piece of the public largess for themselves. That's all. They aren't better at this than anyone else. For that matter, the same could be said for all the other top tech companies. I'm just tired of AWS fans saying that it's strictly merit based. That's not how anything works in big business. It's naïve and childish.
- thosakwe 8y agoThere you have it folks - another large corporation gaining political power.
- TheSpiceIsLife 8y agoWhat's your comprehensive alternative? If you "want to do something BIG", that "BIG" thing is, by definition, going to have an impact. That is to say, it will exert some form of power. And you're probably going to have to do that with other people. Probably in the form of a corporation.
- maxsilver 8y ago> What's your comprehensive alternative? Why can't they build this themselves? If the DoD is such a large customer, has such precise needs and requirements, they should build their own datacenters with their own staff and manage it in-house. > (snip) And you're probably going to have to do that with other people. Probably in the form of a corporation. The government manages a nuclear arsenal and a space flight program. There's no valid reason they couldn't build and run their own server farm without giving it all away to Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Oracle. There's no good reason everything in the entire nation has to be privatized like this.
- stale2002 8y agoWell,sure they COULD build it. But maybe that would cost 2-3-4 times as much as buying it? Why shouldn't they instead go with the best in the world? Presumably, the whole reason why they are doing this, is because they DID build it themselves a decade or so ago, and it didn't result in the best outcome. Government IT has quite a terrible reputation these days. The government should instead be pushing to have the best in the world.
- massysett 8y agoThe nuclear arsenal is maintained with the help of a huge complex of contractors.
- 8y ago
- jonknee 8y agoAmazon being in line to win a large government contract while the President openly despises Amazon is actually a testament to proper government procurement. The real scandal would be if the President ordered Amazon to not be considered because of his personal beef with the Washington Post (and IMO general jealousy regarding Bezos who is actually as successful as Trump has always dreamed of being). tl;dr It is not a scandal that the leading cloud provider is in the pole position for a large cloud contract.
- username3 8y agoOr he wants Amazon and pretending beef.
- oliverx0 8y agoSeems a bit too tailored though - "To even make a bid, a provider must maintain a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers, a prerequisite that only Amazon can currently meet. JEDI also asks for “32 GB of RAM”—the precise specification of Amazon’s services. (Microsoft, by contrast, offers only 28 GB, and Google provides 30 GB.) In places, JEDI echoes Amazon’s own language: It calls for a “ruggedized” storage system, the same word Amazon uses to tout its Snowball Edge product."
- bilbo0s 8y agoGuys, please, try to be reasonable here. 150 miles is not an insert for Amazon. I'm not a general, but even I can see that 150 miles is military sense.
- Spooky23 8y agoIt’s probably 150 miles within an availability zone.
- jeffreybezos 8y agoDatacenters in the same AZ are much closer than 150 miles, right?
- Spooky23 8y agoNo idea Jeff. :) I do know the Iowa is >150 miles from Ashburn, VA, so Google Cloud and Azure should have been able to meet that requirement.
- lmm 8y ago150 specifically just happens to be the military requirement? Not 100 or 200, but 150, which just happens to be the distance that Amazon offers?
- PunchTornado 8y ago
- DonGateley 8y agoPayfuckingwalled.
- forapurpose 8y agoFWIW, it's a long-time, standard complaint by the losers that the specs were written in a way that favored the winner. On one hand, it's an obvious tactic for insiders to favor certain outsiders. On the other, of course the winner has capabilities that better suit the specs - that's the goal of competitive bidding and we should hope that it's true of all winning bidders. So the fact that the winner's capabilities match the specs well doesn't tell us anything; if they didn't match well, it would be signal of corruption in the selection process.
- partiallypro 8y agoOn the other hand doesn't match much with reality, and "regulatory capture" is well documented and it seems that is exactly what has happened here. The big 3, AWS, GSC and Azure should all three be used, at the very least as fail overs.
- ryanmarsh 8y agoI have DoD clients currently doing app dev on new and replacement (for legacy) systems. This writers attempt at making the DoD contract look like a conspiracy is infuriating. The developer experience in the current data center ecosystem is toxic. The infrastructure and insecurity woes compound daily. I don’t care how much Bezos makes, he has a great product and DoD, nay the country, need this. GovCloud would be ice water for people in hell. I’m mad about this because this affects individual contributors, on up to the country at large. Currently money is wasted and systems are built in ridiculous ways. Imagine each sub program in a branch of service rolling it’s own IAM. That’s just a glimpse at what’s going on. The undifferentiated heavy lifting is unfathomable. Before you respond with virtue signaling about war know that most DoD software is for logistics. Done better it boils down to not wasting tax payer money.
- Analemma_ 8y agoThe important thing to realize is that this is par for the course with huge government contracts. There is always rancorous mudslinging, submarine stories, etc. The reality is probably that Amazon is using some shady tactics to try and close this deal, but so are all the other bidders (it's not like Microsoft, who is probably the second-most likely to win JEDI, doesn't have an extensive set of Pentagon connections too). This is just how the game is played and you've gotta roll with it. Eventually this will be awarded one way or the other and we'll all move on.
- count 8y agoAnother thing to look at: Microsoft is almost definitely going to land DoD/IC-wide O365. AWS taking IaaS compute might be the way of giving both Seattle juggernauts some love.
- samstave 8y agoThe cottage industry around this specific contract is going to be massive. Whats really interesting though, is that, a huge swath of talent will be ineligeble to work on this as GovCloud/FedRamp requirements for US Citizen employees, physically located in the US to be able to access and work on any of these systems really does impose some limits on the pool. And while, regardless of how you look at this, it is dysopian from the Corporate-yberPunk-Future perspective (small book seller is now the richest man in the world, and is responsible for the company which monolithically provides the largest government military its computing infra) - There arent really any other alternatives. I'd say that the opportunity sitting right in front of the talent pool who couldnt be legally able to work on GovCloud implementations would be to ramp up their training and setting up consulting groups who can.
- wmf 8y agoIf anybody wants to go to the source: https://www.fbo.gov/index?tab=documents&tabmode=form&subtab=core&tabid=48834ebc53422026828dc19dc681a6d2 https://www.fbo.gov/index?tab=documents&tabmode=form&subtab=... I skimmed through some of this and I don't see anything obviously rigged for AWS. There are mentions of 32GB VMs, but it doesn't say they have to be exactly 32GB. I found the 150-mile requirement but it also doesn't look AWS-specific. The description of the ruggedized "tactical edge" device doesn't sound identical to the existing Snowball Edge.
- joejerryronnie 8y agoI'm pretty sure I saw Bezos and Mattis, on two separate news feeds, simultaneously make a secret Freemason hand signal.
- vadym909 8y agocare to explain this please?
- batiudrami 8y agoit's just a joke mate
- partiallypro 8y agoWhy would such a massively important backbone of US defense want to rely on only a single provider? It should be using all 3 of the major players (or others) and even some on premise stuff. This seems like a nightmare waiting to happen, and crony capitalism at its finest. The fact that Amazon says in the article that using fail overs to other providers is some hassle...is just amazing.
- Spivak 8y agoBecause government contracts of this size play by different rules. They're not using Amazon as a customer like normal companies -- they're hiring Amazon the firm to build something specific for them.
- partiallypro 8y agoA government contract where the sole company that can ever win the contract also says that fail overs to other providers is bad. So if Amazon goes down, the DoD is shit out of luck. I don't see how that's not a national security problem. Not only that, but after the $10 Billion is expended the DoD is vendor locked. How people don't see this as a major problem/cronyism is baffling. The vendor lock itself is bad enough.
- deadbunny 8y agoHows it any different from every other single provider contract ever? Everything's in an IBM DC (or three), they fuck something up? It's down.
- partiallypro 8y agoBecause in this case it relates to national security and if the provider goes down the US is potentially at more risk than it would have been if it had multi-vendor fail overs. I can understand it not being justified for some government programs or companies due to expense or impracticality, but the DoD has a massive budget and a huge pool of resources. Not having multi-vendor fail overs just seems irresponsible given the stakes.
- amaccuish 8y agoMore concerning is the fact that the UK government is happy to store UK data in the US with AWS under its "G-cloud" scheme. At least the US guys have picked a "local" vendor.
- danpalmer 8y agoG-cloud is a pretty broad scheme that covers all sorts of computing services and consulting at all levels of secrecy. It's a marketplace with many different uses. If you do a search with, for example, a minimum provider staff security clearance of DV (which is pretty high, would apply to many matters of national security), all the major cloud providers disappear from the results, and you get smaller companies based in the UK, who use UK datacenters, and who are seemingly adding their own layers of encryption on top.
- jstanley 8y agoIs the interface for such a search publicly accessible?
- culturestate 8y agoThis[1] is the first Google result for "g cloud provider search" - I believe it's what GP is referencing. 1. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/buyers/direct-award/g-cloud/start https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/buyers/direct-...
- jstanley 8y agoNeat, thanks!
- danpalmer 8y agoCorrect. Again, this is all publicly accessible because 99% of the use is not the intelligence services or military, it's instead random government departments, local government offices, hospitals, doctors surgeries, etc. This is designed to replace most computing purchasing in the UK public sector.
- leoc 8y agoAh, so this is why Amazon is evidently making a big hiring push for people with Top Secret clearances, right? https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/landing_pages/AWSClearedVets https://www.amazon.jobs/en-gb/landing_pages/AWSClearedVets
- clay_the_ripper 8y agoWhile this does seem like an insiders rigged game, is that necessarily bad? Business is about relationships. It’s has always been this way and will always continue to be this way. People do business with people they know and like. While the govt is not technically a business as such, awarding a contract is still a business transaction. If the DOD know and trust people at amazon to do a good job, then why shouldn’t amazon get the contract? AWS is an industry leader (if not the leader? Somebody correct me) who obviously knows a great deal about doing a project of this magnitude. It seems to me they would probably do as good a job as any of the other candidates (which seems to be realistically azure or google cloud) so I don’t really see why this is a bad thing. TLDR: amazon knows people at dod, they decide to do business together, who cares?
- objectivetruth 8y agoIt seems like you're asking "why have any sort of accountability in awarding a transaction worth $10 billion of taxpayer money?" Here is how corruption works: Many, many years ago, I was a contract mainframe technician and I worked on local government systems. One day, a colleague offered me a deal: he'd make sure I got a $10,000 contract for a very easy gig with a local city government, but I had to give him $2,000 and I had to give the city government purchaser $2,000. So I'd clear $6,000 for a weekend's work. (The $4,000 bribes are called "kickbacks" if you've heard that phrase before in news stories about public corruption trials.) Now if you think that's an OK way to spend taxpayer money, you need to take an ethics class. (Hint: it's not OK, because an ethical city purchaser would have contracted it out for a much cheaper price and not tried to wet his beak.) Obviously I said no. Now, scale that $4,000 corruption loss on a $10,000 project up to a TEN BILLION DOLLAR project. You ask "who cares?" I reply: everyone who pays US taxes and especially everyone who follows the anti-corruption procurement practices.
- te_chris 8y agoWith that sort of budget, surely the govt. could setup it's own cloud provider?
- tzs 8y ago> To even make a bid, a provider must maintain a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers, a prerequisite that only Amazon can currently meet I don't get this one. Azure's government data centers are in Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, and Texas. Their DoD data centers are Virginia and Iowa. I don't know where they are in those specific states, but the only pair that could be less than 150 miles apart are Texas and Arizona, and that is only if the Arizona one is within a few miles of the SE corner of Arizona and the Texas one is up in the NW sort-of corner of Texas.
- PunchTornado 8y agothe author doesn't know what's going on. Google also meets those requirements easily.
- youdontknowtho 8y agoEveryone seems focused on the numbers 32GB or 150 miles...Amazon has moved into lobbying in a big way. That is the actual story. Bigger than major investment banks. Bezos owns the only paper in Washington that actually does journalism. People involved with Amazon and the head of the DOD have been instrumental in crafting the proposal for JEDI. Just because you learned AWS and it's been good for your resume doesn't mean that they aren't being underhanded in D.C. If you are going to be a fan boy about it, then you should be excited that they seem to be outmaneuvering established players in the federal sector. That's what's happening. This isn't "they built a better mousetrap", this is "they hired all the people that are ever asked about mousetraps, and they changed the language that you have to use to ask for a mousetrap, and they took over one of the better outlets that runs stories about fraud in the mousetrap business. Oh and their commodity mousetrap business is one of three equally good ones." I know that you think AWS is WAY better and that it makes a difference. It doesn't. Azure and GCP are just as good for most of the things that people are building these days. Sure there are differences, but it's a commodity market.