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Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract

198 points by theDoug 8y ago

JumpCrisscross 8y ago
It's Oracle. Safra is super close to the administration [1]. The only reason this contract is out of the hands of Booz Allen et al is Oracle. This might be the worst-kept tech secret in D.C. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-team-talked-to-oracle-s-safra-catz-about-an-administration-post https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-tea...
- microdrum 8y ago
  So you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role in helping the gov't procure this important service? Have you ever met them?
  - JumpCrisscross 8y ago
    > you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role I have no horse in this race. Not sure how you got that impression.
  - cylinder 8y ago
    I have. They're awful
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Booze Allen and Oracle should both be banned from government contracts like this. Considering their histories they are clearly inept.
- th3iedkid 8y ago
  Is your reference behind a paywall ?
  - pc86 8y ago
    You could always click it and find out.
- koboll 8y ago
  Oracle is currently buying out entire DC Metro stations with ad campaigns that consist of the words "ORACLE CLOUD" in white text on a bright red background, so I would imagine this is all part of one big ham-fisted strategy.
- cmiles74 8y ago
  There was an article in The Register a couple weeks ago about a pension fund suing Oracle over their excessive cloud hype, and what sounds like outright threats to punish customers who don't try it out. From the piece: The complaint alleged Oracle has been coercing customers to adopt its cloud services, to inflate revenue and hide market disinterest. "In truth, Oracle drove sales of cloud products using threats and extortive tactics," the complaint, filed on Friday, stated. "The use of such tactics concealed the lack of real demand for Oracle’s cloud services, making the growth unsustainable (and ultimately driving away customers)." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/oracle_sued_cloud_numbers/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/oracle_sued_cloud_n...
  - krylon 8y ago
    I read something similar on a German IT news site a while back. It claimed that Oracle's sales people pressured customers into buying cloud services, and if the customers did not "comply", they were threatened with a license audit that apparently included suspending the customers' licenses until the audit was completed. And if your ERP system is supplied by Oracle, or the database your ERP system runs on (or your financial accounting package), that means you can basically shut down your company until the audit is complete.
    - Murdodc089 8y ago
      That's when you go along with their demands for just as long as it takes to get completely off their products/systems all together.
      - sangnoir 8y ago
        ...and the Oracle sales folk won't care - as long as they meet their (current) targets. Be very careful about the behaviors you incentivize.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  Oracle was my first guess too, but this isn't exactly proof either.
- TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
  Or course it's Oracle. Given how much of the rest of the US government they have by the short hairs, they're desperately trying to legitimize their last-horse entry into cloud computing by leveraging existing relationships as hard as possible. I don't need a 100-page dossier to see that, even from here in the midwest.
- mr_overalls 8y ago
  Oracle is a cancer. Their hostility to their own customers is inexcusable. My company recently suffered through an Oracle audit, and we're being basically extorted to buy Oracle cloud products to avoid a lawsuit. Their corporate culture is just rotten from the top down. Their sales reps' word is worthless, and the attitude is not "How can I help the customer," but "What's my leverage?" Sales people are trained not to find the right fit for their customers, but to exploit their ignorance. They take advantage of customers using opaque terms of service, bullying tactics, and outright deception. It's like they got their business ethics from watching Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
- bobmarley1 8y ago
  What are you insinuating? Booz Allen isn't even a cloud provider at all. They will likely inevitably be involved in the rollout regardless of who the gov goes with, AWS, GCP, Azure etc. but I'm not sure what your point is. I'm also genuinely confused by Oracle being pulled into this, are their execs really so deluded that they think they could actually win this contract or is this just a wild guess?
- Finnucane 8y ago
  I can't believe Oracle would do something so underhanded and unethical. Oh, wait. Yes, I can believe that.
jimjimjim 8y ago
Secret? I thought it was quite obvious. Anyone who is going to miss out on the cash. that's who.
trhway 8y ago
>SBD helped defense industry clients navigate the Pentagon bureaucracy and hone their marketing messages to government buyers, according to company spokesman Price Floyd, who was the assistant defense secretary for public affairs when Donnelly was on Mullen’s staff. at least lobbyists are supposed to register. "Navigation and honing" in government contracting seems to be completely free wheeling.
- kartan 8y ago
  > at least lobbyists are supposed to register I read this with a tone of defeat. :( The lobbying situation is very bad, it is just corruption with extra steps. And its effects are the same one that corruption. Money gets diverted from public utility towards private hands. Cut lobbying and this "Navigation and honing" is also going to be reduced. When a behaviour is normalized it replicates at all levels.
nbevans 8y ago
Looking at Oracle's website, after getting past the hilarious Cookies Policy modal prompt, you really wouldn't think they were genuinely in the cloud business. It just looks like sales fodder with no substance behind it.
- eli 8y ago
  Govt contracts have their own unique sales process and having a detailed webpage is not relevant
- koboll 8y ago
  They aren't "genuinely in the cloud business". They are a vampiric ancient giant slug that lumbers on by drinking the blood of other ancient giant slugs. They have zero interest in marketing cloud infrastructure to, say, startups.
  - andrewflnr 8y ago
    The lamest possible version of warring elder gods. I love it.
  - TheBill 8y ago
    https://goo.gl/MZFbQ9 https://goo.gl/MZFbQ9 Manager, Startup Ecosystem Business Development, Oracle San Fransisco
- Spooky23 8y ago
  They are very much in the cloud business. Oracle salesfolk are essentially not compensated for selling things other than cloud services.
eli 8y ago
I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=21 https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...
- crdoconnor 8y ago
  Lots of people on that thread who seem to think that it's only Trump supporters and/or Russian spies who would be concerned about Amazon's dominance and monopoly power.
- aviraldg 8y ago
  Lost me at the first line: "Jeff Bezos is one of President Donald Trump’s biggest critics." How do Jeff's political opinions affect AWS' suitability as a cloud service provider in any way?
  - anoncoward111 8y ago
    It doesn't, but this is the US we're talking about. Thinge get shady here. Trump is the President and theoretically can call the shots at the Pentagon if he wants to. Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, which, despite having the most popular service, is a company that Trump doesn't like. Oracle has spent probably billions at this point over the decades lobbying Washington. Safra is working very hard to pull strings to keep this contract in the good ol' boy network, considering the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each and every major branch of government spends on Oracle stuff every year.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - tootie 8y ago
    It's also not true. Bezos has said very little about Trump. Trump is mostly pissed because he owns WaPo which reports on his misdeeds.
ohthehugemanate 8y ago
Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirements: * exactly 32gb of RAM. Google promises 30, Azure promises 28. We all know how realistic this isn't. * 150 miles between data centers. This arbitrary number is exactly what Amazon advertises. Others can manage 100 miles, or 130, but this number comes right out of Amazon's advertising package. Not to mention the idiotic idea of a single provider solution. On the other hand, this is a 10 year contract worth about 1% of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's bottom line in one year. So there's a bit of mountain/molehill going on here
- danielvf 8y ago
  Google lets you pick an arbitrary amount of RAM and number of vCPU's when creating an instance. You can easily dial up 32GB of RAM. (Or 37.25 gb of RAM if you feel like it that day.) https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/creating-instance-with-custom-machine-type https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/creating-ins...
- losvedir 8y ago
  Yes, I assumed those were part of this corruption document being shopped around that's discussed in the article. Your points are all the ones raised in that... wapo? nyt? article that you're alluding to, which was discussed here and found to be largely nonsense, IMO. For example, that 28/30/32GB thing is wrong. Are you really saying GCP and Azure don't offer 32GB options? That's a totally standard and common configuration these days.
- hw_penfold 8y ago
  The 32GB of RAM is silly, because virtual machines, and PCI buses lol. But I suspect the 150 mile marker has some other objective driving factor behind the reasoning for that number, which Amazon incidentally has some advanced insight on, due to other commitments. It probably draws directly from line-of-sight targeting at visible horizons for some sort of specific altitude. Zero altitude, mean sea level gets you maybe a thirty mile shot with conventional artillery, targeting a multi-story building. But then again, rail guns seem to be capable of sending shells or slugs over 200 miles [0], so who knows... [0] https://www.cnet.com/news/futuristic-navy-railgun-with-220-mile-range-closer-to-reality/ https://www.cnet.com/news/futuristic-navy-railgun-with-220-m...
sheeshkebab 8y ago
Government contracting is a bizarre place. Eg it’s the only place where an incumbent can sue the client (government) to delay award of a new order to a competitor, while still being paid millions of $$ to continue working for the same client.
jarym 8y ago
I am fairly sure the 'secret' is One Rich A Called Larry Ellisson. Quite possibly in a knock-off suit provided by Hammer Industries...
- tremon 8y ago
  You forgot the -sshole. It's off-topic, but this is what succesful censorship looks like: when you get to the point that people voluntarily self-censor (even on a pseudonymous network), the mission is accomplished.
  - pc86 8y ago
    I don't know about you but I don't want to come to HN and read a bunch of comments of people cursing. There's a difference between self-censorship and just being somewhat professional. I rather like the idea that people here will actually construct a coherent comment instead of just calling other people assholes.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JohnWilcox 8y ago
Unfortunately, the underlying issue here is that the federal government has stolen $10 billion from the American people ... mostly of the people of the future ... against their will, and now people who have no vested interest in how to dispense with other people's money to any degree that is commensurate to the level of responsibility and with virtually zero real accountability or consequences, to offer that money that belongs to other people to monopolistic tech companies that are utterly tyrannical in their spirit as they take over the internet and the whole economy and government and society
ocdtrekkie 8y ago
I suspect the winner will end up being the company with the least morals. Google is likely already out of the running; between Maven and Dragonfly, the Pentagon has to be aware that there's no commitment they can make that doesn't come with an "if our employees don't revolt over it" asterisk. Given the questionable crud our defense department gets into, they'd probably want to avoid that condition at all expenses. Microsoft probably wouldn't be too far behind on that train, I've seen some Microsoft folks upset about some their projects too. Not sure about Amazon, have we heard about upset Amazon employees on a cloud project yet? Oracle has never been too ashamed to play the villain, so I'm sure they'd be willing to do whatever the Pentagon wants. And as a sidebar, single-sourcing all cloud services for the department of defense is still a dumb idea.
sharms 8y ago
There is another side of this, which is workforce training and capabilities. As much as AWS / Azure / GCP are alike, their services and behaviors are very different at a detailed level of overview, requiring separate tooling and best practices. I could see someone wanting to procure a specific cloud vendor as their toolsets already support this.
partiallypro 8y ago
If there is a "secret war," it's to undermine the corruption of the process. The contract is written, as most preferred vendor contracts are, in such a way that at most AWS would have 1-2 competitors which would still not meet the full spec...so AWS (the preferred provider) wins before bidding even begins. Government does this all the time, it's a form of "capture" within the system. Unfortunately Trump has given Bezos cover on a lot of things, simply by criticizing him. Because now if AWS loses the contract people will say Trump intervened or effected the bidding process. Amazon is growing in ways that other companies aren't, and it is unfortunately heavily subsidized by tax dollars, or deferred tax dollars. Example: A recent piece about Amazon negotiating electricity rates, which in the end stiff locals with the brunt of the bill...then there's their corporate welfare rent seeking of HQ2...then there's this contract. They skirt taxes more than average. They treat their floor employees far far worse than Walmart or McDonald's. It's beginning to get a bit ridiculous. If conspiracy theorists want to say Trump is behind the backlash (or a rogue corporation like Oracle,) go for it, but that's not the (full) truth. That's just a cover now, since anything (rightfully in many cases) connected with Trump's criticisms are tainted. Don't fall into that trap, Amazon is beginning to become a troublesome company. I don't know what to do about it, but rewarding them government contracts that are, in the end, rigged to be "no bid" isn't helping. Then on top of that, buying the Amazon line of not using multi-vendor fail overs is baffling. This may be a 10 year contract, but it's built to vendor lock the government.
nova22033 8y ago
Oracle's secret/top secret cloud is completely stealthy. You can't even see it.
danjoc 8y ago
Why would the Defense Dept. choose Google or Microsoft cloud? I wouldn't put US military cloud on GCP or Azure after the Project Maven and ICE thing. Even if they were cheaper. Those companies are full of people who have demonstrated willingness to sabotage America's defenses. Their names are on anti-America petitions around the internet. Amazon has proven willingness to assist military and law enforcement using cloud facial recognition technologies in the face of criticism from detractors. Of course AWS will win.
tlynchpin 8y ago
Is this not a repost? Quick search for the magic word 'ruggedized' turns this up from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754079

198 points by theDoug 8y ago

It's Oracle. Safra is super close to the administration [1]. The only reason this contract is out of the hands of Booz Allen et al is Oracle. This might be the worst-kept tech secret in D.C. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-team-talked-to-oracle-s-safra-catz-about-an-administration-post https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-12/trump-tea...

microdrum 8y ago
So you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role in helping the gov't procure this important service? Have you ever met them?
- JumpCrisscross 8y ago
  > you were hoping that Booz Allen Hamilton would have some kind of role I have no horse in this race. Not sure how you got that impression.
- cylinder 8y ago
  I have. They're awful
paulie_a 8y ago
Booze Allen and Oracle should both be banned from government contracts like this. Considering their histories they are clearly inept.
th3iedkid 8y ago
Is your reference behind a paywall ?
- pc86 8y ago
  You could always click it and find out.
koboll 8y ago
Oracle is currently buying out entire DC Metro stations with ad campaigns that consist of the words "ORACLE CLOUD" in white text on a bright red background, so I would imagine this is all part of one big ham-fisted strategy.
cmiles74 8y ago
There was an article in The Register a couple weeks ago about a pension fund suing Oracle over their excessive cloud hype, and what sounds like outright threats to punish customers who don't try it out. From the piece: The complaint alleged Oracle has been coercing customers to adopt its cloud services, to inflate revenue and hide market disinterest. "In truth, Oracle drove sales of cloud products using threats and extortive tactics," the complaint, filed on Friday, stated. "The use of such tactics concealed the lack of real demand for Oracle’s cloud services, making the growth unsustainable (and ultimately driving away customers)." https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/oracle_sued_cloud_numbers/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/13/oracle_sued_cloud_n...
- krylon 8y ago
  I read something similar on a German IT news site a while back. It claimed that Oracle's sales people pressured customers into buying cloud services, and if the customers did not "comply", they were threatened with a license audit that apparently included suspending the customers' licenses until the audit was completed. And if your ERP system is supplied by Oracle, or the database your ERP system runs on (or your financial accounting package), that means you can basically shut down your company until the audit is complete.
  - Murdodc089 8y ago
    That's when you go along with their demands for just as long as it takes to get completely off their products/systems all together.
    - sangnoir 8y ago
      ...and the Oracle sales folk won't care - as long as they meet their (current) targets. Be very careful about the behaviors you incentivize.
Eridrus 8y ago
Oracle was my first guess too, but this isn't exactly proof either.
TheRealDunkirk 8y ago
Or course it's Oracle. Given how much of the rest of the US government they have by the short hairs, they're desperately trying to legitimize their last-horse entry into cloud computing by leveraging existing relationships as hard as possible. I don't need a 100-page dossier to see that, even from here in the midwest.
mr_overalls 8y ago
Oracle is a cancer. Their hostility to their own customers is inexcusable. My company recently suffered through an Oracle audit, and we're being basically extorted to buy Oracle cloud products to avoid a lawsuit. Their corporate culture is just rotten from the top down. Their sales reps' word is worthless, and the attitude is not "How can I help the customer," but "What's my leverage?" Sales people are trained not to find the right fit for their customers, but to exploit their ignorance. They take advantage of customers using opaque terms of service, bullying tactics, and outright deception. It's like they got their business ethics from watching Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
bobmarley1 8y ago
What are you insinuating? Booz Allen isn't even a cloud provider at all. They will likely inevitably be involved in the rollout regardless of who the gov goes with, AWS, GCP, Azure etc. but I'm not sure what your point is. I'm also genuinely confused by Oracle being pulled into this, are their execs really so deluded that they think they could actually win this contract or is this just a wild guess?
Finnucane 8y ago
I can't believe Oracle would do something so underhanded and unethical. Oh, wait. Yes, I can believe that.

jimjimjim 8y ago

Secret? I thought it was quite obvious. Anyone who is going to miss out on the cash. that's who.

trhway 8y ago

>SBD helped defense industry clients navigate the Pentagon bureaucracy and hone their marketing messages to government buyers, according to company spokesman Price Floyd, who was the assistant defense secretary for public affairs when Donnelly was on Mullen’s staff. at least lobbyists are supposed to register. "Navigation and honing" in government contracting seems to be completely free wheeling.

kartan 8y ago
> at least lobbyists are supposed to register I read this with a tone of defeat. :( The lobbying situation is very bad, it is just corruption with extra steps. And its effects are the same one that corruption. Money gets diverted from public utility towards private hands. Cut lobbying and this "Navigation and honing" is also going to be reduced. When a behaviour is normalized it replicates at all levels.

nbevans 8y ago

Looking at Oracle's website, after getting past the hilarious Cookies Policy modal prompt, you really wouldn't think they were genuinely in the cloud business. It just looks like sales fodder with no substance behind it.

eli 8y ago
Govt contracts have their own unique sales process and having a detailed webpage is not relevant
koboll 8y ago
They aren't "genuinely in the cloud business". They are a vampiric ancient giant slug that lumbers on by drinking the blood of other ancient giant slugs. They have zero interest in marketing cloud infrastructure to, say, startups.
- andrewflnr 8y ago
  The lamest possible version of warring elder gods. I love it.
- TheBill 8y ago
  https://goo.gl/MZFbQ9 https://goo.gl/MZFbQ9 Manager, Startup Ecosystem Business Development, Oracle San Fransisco
Spooky23 8y ago
They are very much in the cloud business. Oracle salesfolk are essentially not compensated for selling things other than cloud services.

eli 8y ago

I’ve been getting what I assume are geotargeted ads for this http://monopolyamazon.com/ http://monopolyamazon.com/ for months on twitter (I work a block from the White House). For example https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=21 https://twitter.com/setonmotley/status/981262337905602560?s=...

crdoconnor 8y ago
Lots of people on that thread who seem to think that it's only Trump supporters and/or Russian spies who would be concerned about Amazon's dominance and monopoly power.
aviraldg 8y ago
Lost me at the first line: "Jeff Bezos is one of President Donald Trump’s biggest critics." How do Jeff's political opinions affect AWS' suitability as a cloud service provider in any way?
- anoncoward111 8y ago
  It doesn't, but this is the US we're talking about. Thinge get shady here. Trump is the President and theoretically can call the shots at the Pentagon if he wants to. Bezos is the CEO of Amazon, which, despite having the most popular service, is a company that Trump doesn't like. Oracle has spent probably billions at this point over the decades lobbying Washington. Safra is working very hard to pull strings to keep this contract in the good ol' boy network, considering the hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue each and every major branch of government spends on Oracle stuff every year.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- tootie 8y ago
  It's also not true. Bezos has said very little about Trump. Trump is mostly pissed because he owns WaPo which reports on his misdeeds.

ohthehugemanate 8y ago

Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement. Some other AWS-only requirements: * exactly 32gb of RAM. Google promises 30, Azure promises 28. We all know how realistic this isn't. * 150 miles between data centers. This arbitrary number is exactly what Amazon advertises. Others can manage 100 miles, or 130, but this number comes right out of Amazon's advertising package. Not to mention the idiotic idea of a single provider solution. On the other hand, this is a 10 year contract worth about 1% of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's bottom line in one year. So there's a bit of mountain/molehill going on here

danielvf 8y ago
Google lets you pick an arbitrary amount of RAM and number of vCPU's when creating an instance. You can easily dial up 32GB of RAM. (Or 37.25 gb of RAM if you feel like it that day.) https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/creating-instance-with-custom-machine-type https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/instances/creating-ins...
losvedir 8y ago
Yes, I assumed those were part of this corruption document being shopped around that's discussed in the article. Your points are all the ones raised in that... wapo? nyt? article that you're alluding to, which was discussed here and found to be largely nonsense, IMO. For example, that 28/30/32GB thing is wrong. Are you really saying GCP and Azure don't offer 32GB options? That's a totally standard and common configuration these days.
hw_penfold 8y ago
The 32GB of RAM is silly, because virtual machines, and PCI buses lol. But I suspect the 150 mile marker has some other objective driving factor behind the reasoning for that number, which Amazon incidentally has some advanced insight on, due to other commitments. It probably draws directly from line-of-sight targeting at visible horizons for some sort of specific altitude. Zero altitude, mean sea level gets you maybe a thirty mile shot with conventional artillery, targeting a multi-story building. But then again, rail guns seem to be capable of sending shells or slugs over 200 miles [0], so who knows... [0] https://www.cnet.com/news/futuristic-navy-railgun-with-220-mile-range-closer-to-reality/ https://www.cnet.com/news/futuristic-navy-railgun-with-220-m...

sheeshkebab 8y ago

Government contracting is a bizarre place. Eg it’s the only place where an incumbent can sue the client (government) to delay award of a new order to a competitor, while still being paid millions of $$ to continue working for the same client.

jarym 8y ago

I am fairly sure the 'secret' is One Rich A Called Larry Ellisson. Quite possibly in a knock-off suit provided by Hammer Industries...

tremon 8y ago
You forgot the -sshole. It's off-topic, but this is what succesful censorship looks like: when you get to the point that people voluntarily self-censor (even on a pseudonymous network), the mission is accomplished.
- pc86 8y ago
  I don't know about you but I don't want to come to HN and read a bunch of comments of people cursing. There's a difference between self-censorship and just being somewhat professional. I rather like the idea that people here will actually construct a coherent comment instead of just calling other people assholes.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JohnWilcox 8y ago

Unfortunately, the underlying issue here is that the federal government has stolen $10 billion from the American people ... mostly of the people of the future ... against their will, and now people who have no vested interest in how to dispense with other people's money to any degree that is commensurate to the level of responsibility and with virtually zero real accountability or consequences, to offer that money that belongs to other people to monopolistic tech companies that are utterly tyrannical in their spirit as they take over the internet and the whole economy and government and society

ocdtrekkie 8y ago

I suspect the winner will end up being the company with the least morals. Google is likely already out of the running; between Maven and Dragonfly, the Pentagon has to be aware that there's no commitment they can make that doesn't come with an "if our employees don't revolt over it" asterisk. Given the questionable crud our defense department gets into, they'd probably want to avoid that condition at all expenses. Microsoft probably wouldn't be too far behind on that train, I've seen some Microsoft folks upset about some their projects too. Not sure about Amazon, have we heard about upset Amazon employees on a cloud project yet? Oracle has never been too ashamed to play the villain, so I'm sure they'd be willing to do whatever the Pentagon wants. And as a sidebar, single-sourcing all cloud services for the department of defense is still a dumb idea.

sharms 8y ago

There is another side of this, which is workforce training and capabilities. As much as AWS / Azure / GCP are alike, their services and behaviors are very different at a detailed level of overview, requiring separate tooling and best practices. I could see someone wanting to procure a specific cloud vendor as their toolsets already support this.

partiallypro 8y ago

If there is a "secret war," it's to undermine the corruption of the process. The contract is written, as most preferred vendor contracts are, in such a way that at most AWS would have 1-2 competitors which would still not meet the full spec...so AWS (the preferred provider) wins before bidding even begins. Government does this all the time, it's a form of "capture" within the system. Unfortunately Trump has given Bezos cover on a lot of things, simply by criticizing him. Because now if AWS loses the contract people will say Trump intervened or effected the bidding process. Amazon is growing in ways that other companies aren't, and it is unfortunately heavily subsidized by tax dollars, or deferred tax dollars. Example: A recent piece about Amazon negotiating electricity rates, which in the end stiff locals with the brunt of the bill...then there's their corporate welfare rent seeking of HQ2...then there's this contract. They skirt taxes more than average. They treat their floor employees far far worse than Walmart or McDonald's. It's beginning to get a bit ridiculous. If conspiracy theorists want to say Trump is behind the backlash (or a rogue corporation like Oracle,) go for it, but that's not the (full) truth. That's just a cover now, since anything (rightfully in many cases) connected with Trump's criticisms are tainted. Don't fall into that trap, Amazon is beginning to become a troublesome company. I don't know what to do about it, but rewarding them government contracts that are, in the end, rigged to be "no bid" isn't helping. Then on top of that, buying the Amazon line of not using multi-vendor fail overs is baffling. This may be a 10 year contract, but it's built to vendor lock the government.

nova22033 8y ago

Oracle's secret/top secret cloud is completely stealthy. You can't even see it.

danjoc 8y ago

Why would the Defense Dept. choose Google or Microsoft cloud? I wouldn't put US military cloud on GCP or Azure after the Project Maven and ICE thing. Even if they were cheaper. Those companies are full of people who have demonstrated willingness to sabotage America's defenses. Their names are on anti-America petitions around the internet. Amazon has proven willingness to assist military and law enforcement using cloud facial recognition technologies in the face of criticism from detractors. Of course AWS will win.

tlynchpin 8y ago

Is this not a repost? Quick search for the magic word 'ruggedized' turns this up from last week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17754079