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Pentagon names Microsoft and Amazon as $10B cloud contract finalists

287 points by RmDen 7y ago

DavidHm 7y ago
I guess Oracle's desperate attempts (to the point of suing the government) to ensure a cash cow for the next decade despite clear tech inferiority were not successful in the end
- ChrisRR 7y ago
  Glad to hear it. I'm disappointed that Oracle keep getting away with their shady and bullish business practices.
- rsweeney21 7y ago
  The government LOVES their oracle databases. They are very entrenched there. I am actually really surprised they weren't selected.
  - altmind 7y ago
    Maybe the government tolerates oracle; have endless pockets and dont care about the financial aspect of using oracle dbms.
    - rsweeney21 7y ago
      We built software for data analysis for the government and had to integrate with their data storage systems. I wasn't exaggerating when I said they loved Oracle. In my experience, they seemed to think Oracle databases were superior in almost every way.
  - snarfy 7y ago
    I think you misspelled loathes.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    Both AWS and Azure support Oracle Databases. This is the selection of a cloud provider, not specific software that would run on that provider. They may very well run Oracle Databases in the future.
    - sheeshkebab 7y ago
      They do run oracle databases - or at least AWS does, in its rds.
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      That may be the case but as my employer is learning it takes a ton of engineering effort to actually run a complicated, large scale oracle DB on the cloud. At every turn you either have to compromise on design or expend a ton of effort getting over the hurdle. Even at large scale running it bare metal and then distributing that around the world is easier (that's what we've been doing). Time will tell if the effort is worth it.
      - scarface74 7y ago
        I’m a cloud True Believer but even I wouldn’t suggest it is the right choice to run any large third party proprietary database like SQL Server or Oracle on AWS. At least with AWS’s custom Aurora/MySQL and Aurora/Postgres offering they are able to rewrite parts of it to take advantage of their other technologies, but when you look at their RDS offerings, it doesn’t really buy you as much if you need to run third party commercial databases at scale.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Background: Oracle made a complaint to the Government Accountability Office last year that was essentially "it is unfair to award ALL $10B to just one company." The GAO disagreed with the following reasoning: > the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows So now Oracle is suing the US Government with exactly the same complaint. Oracle Senior Vice President Ken Glueck is a statement claimed that they're worried the DoD is going to be "locked into" another cloud vendor and that a single vendor "is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy" Make of that as you will.
  - mathattack 7y ago
    Yes. And try to get Oracle to play nicely with Microsoft Technologies. Having multiple vendors is great, but here they are just talking their book. Do they pitch multiple database strategies too?
    - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
      At my employer we're working on just that. It's a hell of a task.
- decoyworker 7y ago
  Good riddance- Oracle cannot die fast enough.
- philjohn 7y ago
  Their claims about JEDI needing a "next generation cloud" and Amazon being a "legacy cloud" that they'll be tied into is laughable as well. Oracle hasn't been next generation ANYTHING since the 90s.
  - arthurcolle 7y ago
    On that note, what's your take on $ORCL's "autonomous database" that they've been marketing over the last couple of years? I saw the Ellison presentation on it when it was first announced and it seems plausible you could tune databases on-the-fly and maybe optimize indices "automatically", given your comment I was curious what you think about this specific offering. https://www.oracle.com/database/what-is-autonomous-database.html https://www.oracle.com/database/what-is-autonomous-database....
    - philjohn 7y ago
      Is it really anything new? Informix was self tuning in the 80s. I suppose you could automatically identify slow queries and identify what indexes would be useful, sort of how a JIT identifies hotspots in code and optimises them. Personally it sounds like a play to keep lucrative enterprise customers on side by allowing them to cut the DBA role that is a necessity for a decent sized Oracle install.
LIV2 7y ago
How long until the staff at Microsoft/Amazon strike?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- prepend 7y ago
  Why would they strike?
  - s_kilk 7y ago
    Because they'd rather not be implicated in turning foreigners from living beings into a fine red mist.
  - JakeWesorick 7y ago
    Google employees went on strike because of a government contract to improve AI used in the targeting of drone strikes. The fallout of that project lead to Google dropping out of the running for this contract citing its "AI principles". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-... https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-will-not-bid-for-the-pentagons-10b-cloud-computing-contract-citing-its-ai-principles/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-will-not-bid-for-th...
    - intern4tional 7y ago
      Microsoft employees are not like Googlers. There was a protest letter that was passed around and I think it got more ex-MSFT than actual employees to sign it. I suspect a few people from both companies will complain but it won't be enough to dictate change. MSFT employees complained about the company working with ICE and while that did get a response, it didn't get the contract canceled.
      - _cs2017_ 7y ago
        Do you think the hiring process at Microsoft somehow selects fewer people with strong political views? Or perhaps the employees are the same, but the corporate executives and culture encourages or discouraged certain behaviors?
rsweeney21 7y ago
I tried to build a VC backed startup that sold a SaaS product to state and federal governments. The procurement process for the government is so horrible and broken that it blew me away. From first conversation to signed contract will take 2 years minimum. It's filled with legal challenges, back room deals, inefficiencies, a ridiculous RFP process. You run out of money before you even get your first contract signed. It was so strange to me to sit in meetings and talk about how we could make them so much more efficient and they would talk about having the problem solved in 5 or 10 year timelines. Having spent most of my career at Microsoft and Netflix where a year feels like an eternity, it's just a completely different world.
- foolfoolz 7y ago
  the other side of it is the decision you make like this in government will have a 30-50 year impact. making changes is not easy for anyone, but you can change an entire infrastructure at microsoft in a tenth of the time you could do it at the DoD
  - bwb 7y ago
    Well said, buying for an entity that needs to survive to the end of time is a totally different ballgame.
  - basseq 7y ago
    For comparison, the DoD's 2019 budget ($686B) is six times Microsoft's 2018 revenue ($110B). It is one-hundred and sixty-three times Netflix's $4B. Add that to relative technical aptitude, regulatory compliance, etc. and it doesn't surprise me Government is going to take longer.
- exelius 7y ago
  The procurement process for the government is broken because our political system is broken. You need deep pockets and political connections. This is actually Elon Musk’s greatest triumph; almost all of his post-PayPal businesses are based on exploiting weaknesses in government regulatory (Tesla, PayPal) or procurement processes (SpaceX, boring company). SpaceX was legitimate innovation in a broken government contracting process, but Tesla is starting to look like it was only a viable business with the subsidies — I would anticipate their business model to shift away from vehicles soon and turn towards large-scale grid infrastructure (aka government contracting).
tynpeddler 7y ago
The $10B number seems funny. Government procurement contracts and projects routinely overrun their budgets and schedules by a factor of 2 or more (something software developers should be familiar with). I wouldn't be surprised if the winner of this contract got considerably more than $10B from this contract alone.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  It is a $1B/year contract for 10 years, but the DoD has a number of early-outs if costs overrun or the vendor under-performs.
  - degenerate 7y ago
    Where are the details of this? I'd like to give it a read, thanks.
    - Someone1234 7y ago
      In the article this thread is about.
cloakandswagger 7y ago
Glad to see the attempt to split the contract up by appealing for a multi-platform approach failed. A multi-platform approach destroys most of the cloud's value proposition in the name of avoiding vendor lock-in. At that point you're essentially only using the provider as a glorified data center manager, and I'm pretty sure the DOD has more than enough money to run their own data centers.
- erentz 7y ago
  I would love someone to explain clearly the strategy of "multi-cloud" products to me, what they do, and how they are long term viable. (I do mean this genuinely because I'm not getting it.) 1. Surely there is no way for any "multi-cloud" company to keep up with the constant changes and growth of products at all these companies that they can abstract between them in any meaningful way without constantly falling behind. 2. And if there is some purpose right now, is that purpose sustainable? Why would Amazon not have every incentive at some point to make it as easy as possible for an existing Microsoft customer to migrate workloads over to their platform, and vice versa. And if/when they get into the game, isn't that essentially game over for any independent product?
  - empath75 7y ago
    > Surely there is no way for any "multi-cloud" company to keep up with the constant changes and growth of products at all these companies that they can abstract between them in any meaningful way without constantly falling behind. This is the appeal of kubernetes. And yes, it does make cloud providers glorified datacenters. I think k8s is an existential threat to aws long term. They're not going to be able to maintain their profit margins on ec2.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      And Kubernetes still can’t give you all of the benefits of managed databases, queuing, messaging systems, etc. If you’re only using the cloud to do VMs at scale, you’re probably spending more than baremetal and spending just as much on maintenance. Kubernetes adds yet another level of complexity.
robmiller 7y ago
I heard the guy who wrote the government regulations for cloud computing promptly resigned after it passed and went to go work for AWS.
- aluminussoma 7y ago
  As long as he has no interactions with his former colleagues, I don't see the issue. You want to make sure your company is following all the rules: who can tell you that better than the person drafting those rules?
- rsweeney21 7y ago
  The government hired us to write the RFP to purchase our software. Apparently this is common practice. Ironically, they ended up selecting a different vendor in the end.
- ben509 7y ago
  I'm still in favor of the revolving door surtax. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/28/revolving-door-government-ethics/1868597/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/28/revolving-...
- Voloskaya 7y ago
  Presumably, he was chosen to write the government regulations for cloud computing because he knew a lot about cloud computing. Would like that anyone that ever worked for the government forever be banned to work in their domain of expertise for a private company?
mikehines 7y ago
Great to see Pentagon plays Amazon like a champ.
- adventured 7y ago
  It'd be slightly amusing to see the Pentagon work Amazon over on negotiations like Amazon worked cities over on HQ2. Amazon ran into an entity that was larger than itself.
  - jhall1468 7y ago
    You think Amazon cares? They will happily eat this as a loss-leader. Neither MS or Amazon is fighting over this for a measly $1B a year. They are fighting over this for $100s of Billions of contracts with other parts of the government.
    - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
      Not just other parts of government. There are a lot of big defense companies (ie Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc). Being on the same cloud as the DoD is going to be a big selling point.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      “The nose of the camel under the tent” strategy.
troxwalt 7y ago
Can dig into the details here https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=3860a4f4fe9d9ffc31e722ece82a143c https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=3860a4f4fe9d9ffc31e722ece82a143...
barbecue_sauce 7y ago
Should have given it to Linode.
dgjrhgi 7y ago
There have been news of group of employees opposing this internally at Microsoft. Employees feel that they have been cheated/mis-guided my MS.
- jsgo 7y ago
  Think that was with Hololens. Previously there were qualms with Office too. Though I imagine there'll be an open letter about this one too. Dunno, I try to be sympathetic to concerns, but don't work for a business that is willing to do government contracts (or have the government as a customer, for that matter) if you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government.
  - fxbl0i 7y ago
    >you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government Is this the work of some kind of extremist libertarian branch inside of Microsoft?
    - jsgo 7y ago
      the open letters and what not? I have no issues with their, or Google employees for that matter, frustrations on a surface level, but at some point you either have to make peace with the fact that what you're working on has the potential to be leveraged in a way you don't agree with or move on to somewhere else where you have some semblance of the corporate ethics and/or morality aligning with your own if that matters to you as a person. Unintended consequences stink, I totally agree as I did a bunch of enhancements on a system once with the intention of making everyone using it have an easier time but it resulted in the company needing less people to do the job (not by firing thankfully, but these roles were filled by temporary workers so as attrition naturally happened, instead of being a revolving door, they just weren't replaced as they were leaving). Felt miserable about it when it happened and it still informs me to this day, but I also learned from the experience that you can intend one thing yet the result can be very different.
  - madrox 7y ago
    The lower you go on the stack, the greater likelihood you're building something that could be used in a way you disagree with. I don't know how you can work on a cloud provider ANYWHERE and not have this issue. I don't know how you can work on any open infrastructure, honestly. There are worse actors than the government already in the cloud, if you ask me.
DiseasedBadger 7y ago
Which choice betters my career prospects if I'm just getting into AWS development/integration?
- hugey010 7y ago
  Pick one, build something non-trivial for it, learn and form opinions about it. Rinse and repeat this process while exploring new tools and technology. Try to automate as much as possible. If you can stay relatively sane after a handful of iterations, you are not only an expert on cloud computing platforms, but an expert on the kinds of decisions, skills, tools, techniques, and experience needed to succeed in the industry. You can do it!
- scarface74 7y ago
  Choice between what? AWS vs Azure is about like Java vs C# in the enterprise. AWS is twice as popular, but you won’t go wanting if you’re good with Azure technologies. No GCP is so far behind in adoption and mindshare it’s just not worth it to me.
bbcfake 7y ago
Pentagon keep competition on. Oh what a joke it is..
Jenz 7y ago
No suprises there
ben509 7y ago
I know both companies want this contract badly, but if your company lands the contract and they say, "we need engineers to work on building this out," RUN AWAY. Anyone at AWS who worked on GovCloud and similar projects can tell you it's going to be a s*show.
- baseballMan 7y ago
  Yeah...Azure Gov is the same. They'll always be behind the commercial offering.
partiallypro 7y ago
No surprise, I believe they are the only two that even came close to the requirements.
baseballMan 7y ago
No real surprise here..
mariust 7y ago
Oracle = lawsuit, go home oracle your drunk!

287 points by RmDen 7y ago

I guess Oracle's desperate attempts (to the point of suing the government) to ensure a cash cow for the next decade despite clear tech inferiority were not successful in the end

ChrisRR 7y ago
Glad to hear it. I'm disappointed that Oracle keep getting away with their shady and bullish business practices.
rsweeney21 7y ago
The government LOVES their oracle databases. They are very entrenched there. I am actually really surprised they weren't selected.
- altmind 7y ago
  Maybe the government tolerates oracle; have endless pockets and dont care about the financial aspect of using oracle dbms.
  - rsweeney21 7y ago
    We built software for data analysis for the government and had to integrate with their data storage systems. I wasn't exaggerating when I said they loved Oracle. In my experience, they seemed to think Oracle databases were superior in almost every way.
- snarfy 7y ago
  I think you misspelled loathes.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Both AWS and Azure support Oracle Databases. This is the selection of a cloud provider, not specific software that would run on that provider. They may very well run Oracle Databases in the future.
  - sheeshkebab 7y ago
    They do run oracle databases - or at least AWS does, in its rds.
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    That may be the case but as my employer is learning it takes a ton of engineering effort to actually run a complicated, large scale oracle DB on the cloud. At every turn you either have to compromise on design or expend a ton of effort getting over the hurdle. Even at large scale running it bare metal and then distributing that around the world is easier (that's what we've been doing). Time will tell if the effort is worth it.
    - scarface74 7y ago
      I’m a cloud True Believer but even I wouldn’t suggest it is the right choice to run any large third party proprietary database like SQL Server or Oracle on AWS. At least with AWS’s custom Aurora/MySQL and Aurora/Postgres offering they are able to rewrite parts of it to take advantage of their other technologies, but when you look at their RDS offerings, it doesn’t really buy you as much if you need to run third party commercial databases at scale.
Someone1234 7y ago
Background: Oracle made a complaint to the Government Accountability Office last year that was essentially "it is unfair to award ALL $10B to just one company." The GAO disagreed with the following reasoning: > the Defense Department’s decision to pursue a single-award approach to obtain these cloud services is consistent with applicable statutes (and regulations) because the agency reasonably determined that a single-award approach is in the government’s best interests for various reasons, including national security concerns, as the statute allows So now Oracle is suing the US Government with exactly the same complaint. Oracle Senior Vice President Ken Glueck is a statement claimed that they're worried the DoD is going to be "locked into" another cloud vendor and that a single vendor "is out of sync with industry’s multi-cloud strategy" Make of that as you will.
- mathattack 7y ago
  Yes. And try to get Oracle to play nicely with Microsoft Technologies. Having multiple vendors is great, but here they are just talking their book. Do they pitch multiple database strategies too?
  - dsfyu404ed 7y ago
    At my employer we're working on just that. It's a hell of a task.
decoyworker 7y ago
Good riddance- Oracle cannot die fast enough.
philjohn 7y ago
Their claims about JEDI needing a "next generation cloud" and Amazon being a "legacy cloud" that they'll be tied into is laughable as well. Oracle hasn't been next generation ANYTHING since the 90s.
- arthurcolle 7y ago
  On that note, what's your take on $ORCL's "autonomous database" that they've been marketing over the last couple of years? I saw the Ellison presentation on it when it was first announced and it seems plausible you could tune databases on-the-fly and maybe optimize indices "automatically", given your comment I was curious what you think about this specific offering. https://www.oracle.com/database/what-is-autonomous-database.html https://www.oracle.com/database/what-is-autonomous-database....
  - philjohn 7y ago
    Is it really anything new? Informix was self tuning in the 80s. I suppose you could automatically identify slow queries and identify what indexes would be useful, sort of how a JIT identifies hotspots in code and optimises them. Personally it sounds like a play to keep lucrative enterprise customers on side by allowing them to cut the DBA role that is a necessity for a decent sized Oracle install.

LIV2 7y ago

How long until the staff at Microsoft/Amazon strike?

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
prepend 7y ago
Why would they strike?
- s_kilk 7y ago
  Because they'd rather not be implicated in turning foreigners from living beings into a fine red mist.
- JakeWesorick 7y ago
  Google employees went on strike because of a government contract to improve AI used in the targeting of drone strikes. The fallout of that project lead to Google dropping out of the running for this contract citing its "AI principles". https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-ceo-pentagon-project.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/04/technology/google-letter-... https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-will-not-bid-for-the-pentagons-10b-cloud-computing-contract-citing-its-ai-principles/ https://techcrunch.com/2018/10/08/google-will-not-bid-for-th...
  - intern4tional 7y ago
    Microsoft employees are not like Googlers. There was a protest letter that was passed around and I think it got more ex-MSFT than actual employees to sign it. I suspect a few people from both companies will complain but it won't be enough to dictate change. MSFT employees complained about the company working with ICE and while that did get a response, it didn't get the contract canceled.
    - _cs2017_ 7y ago
      Do you think the hiring process at Microsoft somehow selects fewer people with strong political views? Or perhaps the employees are the same, but the corporate executives and culture encourages or discouraged certain behaviors?

rsweeney21 7y ago

I tried to build a VC backed startup that sold a SaaS product to state and federal governments. The procurement process for the government is so horrible and broken that it blew me away. From first conversation to signed contract will take 2 years minimum. It's filled with legal challenges, back room deals, inefficiencies, a ridiculous RFP process. You run out of money before you even get your first contract signed. It was so strange to me to sit in meetings and talk about how we could make them so much more efficient and they would talk about having the problem solved in 5 or 10 year timelines. Having spent most of my career at Microsoft and Netflix where a year feels like an eternity, it's just a completely different world.

foolfoolz 7y ago
the other side of it is the decision you make like this in government will have a 30-50 year impact. making changes is not easy for anyone, but you can change an entire infrastructure at microsoft in a tenth of the time you could do it at the DoD
- bwb 7y ago
  Well said, buying for an entity that needs to survive to the end of time is a totally different ballgame.
- basseq 7y ago
  For comparison, the DoD's 2019 budget ($686B) is six times Microsoft's 2018 revenue ($110B). It is one-hundred and sixty-three times Netflix's $4B. Add that to relative technical aptitude, regulatory compliance, etc. and it doesn't surprise me Government is going to take longer.
exelius 7y ago
The procurement process for the government is broken because our political system is broken. You need deep pockets and political connections. This is actually Elon Musk’s greatest triumph; almost all of his post-PayPal businesses are based on exploiting weaknesses in government regulatory (Tesla, PayPal) or procurement processes (SpaceX, boring company). SpaceX was legitimate innovation in a broken government contracting process, but Tesla is starting to look like it was only a viable business with the subsidies — I would anticipate their business model to shift away from vehicles soon and turn towards large-scale grid infrastructure (aka government contracting).

tynpeddler 7y ago

The $10B number seems funny. Government procurement contracts and projects routinely overrun their budgets and schedules by a factor of 2 or more (something software developers should be familiar with). I wouldn't be surprised if the winner of this contract got considerably more than $10B from this contract alone.

Someone1234 7y ago
It is a $1B/year contract for 10 years, but the DoD has a number of early-outs if costs overrun or the vendor under-performs.
- degenerate 7y ago
  Where are the details of this? I'd like to give it a read, thanks.
  - Someone1234 7y ago
    In the article this thread is about.

cloakandswagger 7y ago

Glad to see the attempt to split the contract up by appealing for a multi-platform approach failed. A multi-platform approach destroys most of the cloud's value proposition in the name of avoiding vendor lock-in. At that point you're essentially only using the provider as a glorified data center manager, and I'm pretty sure the DOD has more than enough money to run their own data centers.

erentz 7y ago
I would love someone to explain clearly the strategy of "multi-cloud" products to me, what they do, and how they are long term viable. (I do mean this genuinely because I'm not getting it.) 1. Surely there is no way for any "multi-cloud" company to keep up with the constant changes and growth of products at all these companies that they can abstract between them in any meaningful way without constantly falling behind. 2. And if there is some purpose right now, is that purpose sustainable? Why would Amazon not have every incentive at some point to make it as easy as possible for an existing Microsoft customer to migrate workloads over to their platform, and vice versa. And if/when they get into the game, isn't that essentially game over for any independent product?
- empath75 7y ago
  > Surely there is no way for any "multi-cloud" company to keep up with the constant changes and growth of products at all these companies that they can abstract between them in any meaningful way without constantly falling behind. This is the appeal of kubernetes. And yes, it does make cloud providers glorified datacenters. I think k8s is an existential threat to aws long term. They're not going to be able to maintain their profit margins on ec2.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    And Kubernetes still can’t give you all of the benefits of managed databases, queuing, messaging systems, etc. If you’re only using the cloud to do VMs at scale, you’re probably spending more than baremetal and spending just as much on maintenance. Kubernetes adds yet another level of complexity.

robmiller 7y ago

I heard the guy who wrote the government regulations for cloud computing promptly resigned after it passed and went to go work for AWS.

aluminussoma 7y ago
As long as he has no interactions with his former colleagues, I don't see the issue. You want to make sure your company is following all the rules: who can tell you that better than the person drafting those rules?
rsweeney21 7y ago
The government hired us to write the RFP to purchase our software. Apparently this is common practice. Ironically, they ended up selecting a different vendor in the end.
ben509 7y ago
I'm still in favor of the revolving door surtax. https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/28/revolving-door-government-ethics/1868597/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/01/28/revolving-...
Voloskaya 7y ago
Presumably, he was chosen to write the government regulations for cloud computing because he knew a lot about cloud computing. Would like that anyone that ever worked for the government forever be banned to work in their domain of expertise for a private company?

mikehines 7y ago

Great to see Pentagon plays Amazon like a champ.

adventured 7y ago
It'd be slightly amusing to see the Pentagon work Amazon over on negotiations like Amazon worked cities over on HQ2. Amazon ran into an entity that was larger than itself.
- jhall1468 7y ago
  You think Amazon cares? They will happily eat this as a loss-leader. Neither MS or Amazon is fighting over this for a measly $1B a year. They are fighting over this for $100s of Billions of contracts with other parts of the government.
  - RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
    Not just other parts of government. There are a lot of big defense companies (ie Boeing, Lockheed, Raytheon, etc). Being on the same cloud as the DoD is going to be a big selling point.
  - scarface74 7y ago
    “The nose of the camel under the tent” strategy.

troxwalt 7y ago

Can dig into the details here https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=3860a4f4fe9d9ffc31e722ece82a143c https://www.fbo.gov/index?id=3860a4f4fe9d9ffc31e722ece82a143...

barbecue_sauce 7y ago

Should have given it to Linode.

dgjrhgi 7y ago

There have been news of group of employees opposing this internally at Microsoft. Employees feel that they have been cheated/mis-guided my MS.

jsgo 7y ago
Think that was with Hololens. Previously there were qualms with Office too. Though I imagine there'll be an open letter about this one too. Dunno, I try to be sympathetic to concerns, but don't work for a business that is willing to do government contracts (or have the government as a customer, for that matter) if you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government.
- fxbl0i 7y ago
  >you don't want anything you work on to be used by the government Is this the work of some kind of extremist libertarian branch inside of Microsoft?
  - jsgo 7y ago
    the open letters and what not? I have no issues with their, or Google employees for that matter, frustrations on a surface level, but at some point you either have to make peace with the fact that what you're working on has the potential to be leveraged in a way you don't agree with or move on to somewhere else where you have some semblance of the corporate ethics and/or morality aligning with your own if that matters to you as a person. Unintended consequences stink, I totally agree as I did a bunch of enhancements on a system once with the intention of making everyone using it have an easier time but it resulted in the company needing less people to do the job (not by firing thankfully, but these roles were filled by temporary workers so as attrition naturally happened, instead of being a revolving door, they just weren't replaced as they were leaving). Felt miserable about it when it happened and it still informs me to this day, but I also learned from the experience that you can intend one thing yet the result can be very different.
- madrox 7y ago
  The lower you go on the stack, the greater likelihood you're building something that could be used in a way you disagree with. I don't know how you can work on a cloud provider ANYWHERE and not have this issue. I don't know how you can work on any open infrastructure, honestly. There are worse actors than the government already in the cloud, if you ask me.

DiseasedBadger 7y ago

Which choice betters my career prospects if I'm just getting into AWS development/integration?

hugey010 7y ago
Pick one, build something non-trivial for it, learn and form opinions about it. Rinse and repeat this process while exploring new tools and technology. Try to automate as much as possible. If you can stay relatively sane after a handful of iterations, you are not only an expert on cloud computing platforms, but an expert on the kinds of decisions, skills, tools, techniques, and experience needed to succeed in the industry. You can do it!
scarface74 7y ago
Choice between what? AWS vs Azure is about like Java vs C# in the enterprise. AWS is twice as popular, but you won’t go wanting if you’re good with Azure technologies. No GCP is so far behind in adoption and mindshare it’s just not worth it to me.

bbcfake 7y ago

Pentagon keep competition on. Oh what a joke it is..

Jenz 7y ago

No suprises there

ben509 7y ago

I know both companies want this contract badly, but if your company lands the contract and they say, "we need engineers to work on building this out," RUN AWAY. Anyone at AWS who worked on GovCloud and similar projects can tell you it's going to be a s*show.

baseballMan 7y ago
Yeah...Azure Gov is the same. They'll always be behind the commercial offering.

partiallypro 7y ago

No surprise, I believe they are the only two that even came close to the requirements.

baseballMan 7y ago

No real surprise here..

mariust 7y ago

Oracle = lawsuit, go home oracle your drunk!