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Pretty sure that is not possible because if this contract is anything like the previous 2 that AWS has won, they will literally be building entire airgapped dat

by mrep 7y ago

Pretty sure that is not possible because if this contract is anything like the previous 2 that AWS has won, they will literally be building entire airgapped datacenters for the government full of their custom server designs running all of their custom cloud software. You're not going to be able to just uninstall dynamodb, EBS, or S3 from the datacenter servers and expect to be able to spin up one of Azures or GCPs matching service using the same hardware.

toomuchtodo 7y ago
Why would you not expect to be able to port your data and applications to another cloud provider? They all can run x86 virtual machines, they all can store data on iSCSI equivalents (EBS) or in object stores. No one is writing custom code to run on custom hardware at cloud providers (except perhaps to optimize for specific hardware extensions, GPUs, etc).
- mrep 7y ago
  Sure you can probably port your code over just fine, but it's going to take 3 years for another cloud provider to build an entire airgapped datacenter and launch each internal service in it. Considering the CIAs 600 million dollar contract got an entire one dedicated for them, I wouldn't be surprised if this contract which goes up to 10 billion dollars ended up involving multiple new regions. As I said, another cloud provider won't be able to simply just take over those datacenters and install their software, they'll probably have to build their own airgapped datacenters which will take years. So no, there is no way it's going to be easy for them to port over to another cloud provider.
  - toomuchtodo 7y ago
    If the DoD makes it a requirement that a new service provider can take ownership of the physical facility and it’s contents, a new provider could most certainly assume responsibility for the cloud system. It’s a contractual issue, not a technical issue, no different than China requiring AWS’ China data center region be operated by a Chinese company versus AWS proper.
    - mrep 7y ago
      I've worked for multiple major cloud providers and I assure you that launching the dependency chain to get most cloud services in production for 1 region takes 6 months minimum (they have entire teams dedicated to launching regions). That is after building the datacenter (years) and launching the main database services (which require custom server hardware as I previously mentioned) that power most of the main cloud services. Google uses spanner, AWS uses dynamodb, and Azure uses Cosmodb which are all different database systems and thus they are all completely incompatible.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]

by mrep 7y ago

toomuchtodo 7y ago

Why would you not expect to be able to port your data and applications to another cloud provider? They all can run x86 virtual machines, they all can store data on iSCSI equivalents (EBS) or in object stores. No one is writing custom code to run on custom hardware at cloud providers (except perhaps to optimize for specific hardware extensions, GPUs, etc).

mrep 7y ago
Sure you can probably port your code over just fine, but it's going to take 3 years for another cloud provider to build an entire airgapped datacenter and launch each internal service in it. Considering the CIAs 600 million dollar contract got an entire one dedicated for them, I wouldn't be surprised if this contract which goes up to 10 billion dollars ended up involving multiple new regions. As I said, another cloud provider won't be able to simply just take over those datacenters and install their software, they'll probably have to build their own airgapped datacenters which will take years. So no, there is no way it's going to be easy for them to port over to another cloud provider.
- toomuchtodo 7y ago
  If the DoD makes it a requirement that a new service provider can take ownership of the physical facility and it’s contents, a new provider could most certainly assume responsibility for the cloud system. It’s a contractual issue, not a technical issue, no different than China requiring AWS’ China data center region be operated by a Chinese company versus AWS proper.
  - mrep 7y ago
    I've worked for multiple major cloud providers and I assure you that launching the dependency chain to get most cloud services in production for 1 region takes 6 months minimum (they have entire teams dedicated to launching regions). That is after building the datacenter (years) and launching the main database services (which require custom server hardware as I previously mentioned) that power most of the main cloud services. Google uses spanner, AWS uses dynamodb, and Azure uses Cosmodb which are all different database systems and thus they are all completely incompatible.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]