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In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places

• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• jacksnipe 7y ago
  I’m not the biggest fan of AWS, but I feel like giving $10B to Oracle or IBM, well, you might as well just burn the money.
  • bob33212 7y ago
    Especially since that 10B becomes 20B when in 5 years, Oracle tells you that you that your initial implementations are being EOLed and you need to start over.
    • tootie 7y ago
      It's $2B for services, 8 for litigation.
  • whoisthisfor 7y ago
    I'd be fine with either AWS or Azure getting the contact. It makes sense to pick one provider, as their workloads are ... unique.
    • iamtheworstdev 7y ago
      I've been torn on this contract from a professional experience POV. In the IC we got AWS after they beat out IBM and the IBM protest. I'm an AWS fan so I was excited and it worked well for me when I was a contractor (I'm no longer in the space). But having the DOD on AWS along with the IC concerns me from a lack of diversity standpoint. I've always said that Microsoft and Google should have teamed up a bit to make a competitive run. But I don't think anyone was ever interested in sharing the contract to begin with.
      • dkhenry 7y ago
        Azure has a large presence in the government and they have a fairly robust offering that multiple agencies use. So its not as big a mono culture as you might think. I know this one contract makes lots of noise because its the DoD and people think the military is this huge organism, but the Department of Veterans Affairs was on tract to spend 1B on cloud per year and they use Azure ( as well as AWS )
        • aserafini 7y ago
          It blows my mind a department dedicated to Veterans Affairs can spend 1 billion on cloud computing in a year, do you have a source or any more information about what they’re spending that on?
          • maxehnert 7y ago
            They're probably the largest hospital provider in the country. Looking at their wiki it says there's 152 hospitals and 1400 outpatient facilities. Plus all the other VA responsibilities they fulfill. It's a big organization and they have a lot of 'customers'
  • tssva 7y ago
    The options aren't just give $10B to AWS, Oracle, IBM or Microsoft. The JEDI should have been a multi-award IDIQ (indefinite delivery indefinite quantity) contract. With a multi-award IDIQ the each task order issued under the IDIQ is competed for among the multiple vendors the IDIQ has been awarded to. It is actually fairly unusual that this type of IT services contract was not done as a multi-award IDIQ. Having to compete for each task order is thought to reduce costs to the government. Of course having to compete each task brings its own additional costs which don't necessarily make the cost saving proposition true. The big benefit I see to this contract is that it helps prevent vendor lock-in. I don't worry about the next 10 years and $10B, but what happens after 10 years when the DoD is now locked in to proprietary AWS cloud features which make migrating to a different vendor technically and fiscally near impossible.
    • dkhenry 7y ago
      You should not do infrastructure as IDIQ, this is an infrastructure contract. The idea that all contracts issued by IT are for "IT Services" is part of the reason digital systems at the DOD and other government agencies are such a nightmare. HAving a single system to build off of is the best way to do it, and not having that system be a customer solution for just the government is way better then not. Lock in is the only concern, but from my experience doing an IDIQ or multi-vendor won't solve the lock in problem. The best thing to solve that is to make sure your using bland normal things not customer government thigs.
      • killjoywashere 7y ago
        You know, I've been in some data centers and top 50 HPC clusters ... I don't understand why the US government doesn't run it's own cloud systems, except for the appropriations. There are enough computer scientists in the larger org to field a major distributed systems engineering group.
        • delfinom 7y ago
          >I don't understand why the US government doesn't run it's own cloud systems, except for the appropriations. Inability to pay high enough salaries for anyone to maintain it properly AND move it forward with new tech.
  • geofft 7y ago
    As an opponent of US defense spending, this is why I strongly favor Oracle or IBM getting the contract.
    • ImprovedSilence 7y ago
      Because you’d rather have wasteful spending than moderately productive spending...? Seems like you want the government to waste money just so you can say “I told you so”. Like it or not, defense spending is a huge boost to the middle class stem job market, and taking it out would have consequences wider ranging than you think. With “white collar welfare” I’d argue the gov gets a better return on its investment than most other options, while arguably making it harder for developing nations to become a threat via brain drain because the stem market is strong here.
      • philwelch 7y ago
        As you may remember from the Project Maven controversy, there are a lot of people on HN and in the tech community who are fundamentally opposed to the US military being more effective at carrying out its missions.
        • ethbro 7y ago
          There are also a lot of people who support military effectiveness and efficiency. And even more who remember where Silicon Valley's initial contracts came from...
      • geofft 7y ago
        Yes, precisely—wasteful defense spending accomplishes the goal of supporting the middle class with jobs while failing at the goal of killing people. It's not an "I told you so" thing. I'm genuinely fine with massive taxpayer-supported boondoggles that create jobs in the long term. My objection to defense spending is that it kills people, not that it takes money from my paycheck to create more paychecks.
        • 7y ago
• ghostcluster 7y ago
  Lots of drama to this story, between the apparent sabotage from Oracle to the politics of the president not favoring AWS just for spite, to the Pentagon's acronym for its cloud move: JEDI. The article states that Microsoft does not yet have the security clearances for JEDI yet, but is working on it, but nowhere in the piece does it mention Google's cloud services. Are they in the running as well? Are there any other giant enterprise cloud platform businesses that I'm unaware of? Dropbox uses AWS. The other interesting thing about this, circling back to Oracle, is the changing of the technological guard here. One can imagine all sorts of government databases running on IBM mainframes, using Oracle software. But now, the shift to enterprise cloud has arrived. I guess this must be happening across the entire industry.
  • selimthegrim 7y ago
    Oracle has a lengthy checkered history with the CIA
    • bhouston 7y ago
      Who powers the pirvate NSA datacenters in terms of hardware and software? I understand that was close to a 10B investment.
      • dekhn 7y ago
        I can't say authoritatively, but the times I've talked with NSA admins (who of course didn't say they worked for NSA, but DoD) they used a lot of IBM stuff, not the least of which is because IBM would handle support requests on Christmas Eve.
      • nova22033 7y ago
        AWS provides C2S for the intel community https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/ https://aws.amazon.com/federal/us-intelligence-community/
  • syshum 7y ago
    >>Are there any other giant enterprise cloud platform businesses that I'm unaware of? I dont know what you consider "giant" but there are the various IBM Cloud Offerings
• bediger4000 7y ago
  This headline seems... misleading. There's only one high places foe mentioned, and that's Trump. Every other high level official mentioned seems to be doing Trump's bidding on this. Also, how is having someone high up intervening in a business process a big violation of free market principles? I don't recall the article mentioning this either. As I think about it, this just reeks of crony capitalism. Didn't we just (2008 or so) decide that was a bad way to do an economy? Isn't the NYT slant generally in favor of laissez faire free markets? Why the switch here?
  • akhilcacharya 7y ago
    You're right, but unfortunately the idea of a President individually attempting to punish individuals and businesses that criticize him is considered normal now.
• resters 7y ago
  The worst thing about this in my opinion is that as much as I personally dislike Trump, the WaPo has lowered the quality of its journalism tremendously over the past decade and so unfortunately Trump’s critiques of the WaPo are not lacking in substance. Bezos should have stepped in to make certain that the WaPo improve the quality of its journalism even if the easiest path to profits is just to provide entertaining stories to the #resist partisans. There is plenty to write serious investigative journalism about that will have the consequence of weakening Trump politically (if that is the goal) so there was no need to become a tabloid. Arguably the WaPo’s reporting on Saudi Arabia led to the grudge match that culminated in outing Bezos’ philandering, and the subsequent major decrease in Bezos’ wealth. KSA is led by an abhorrent group of royals, but the WaPo’s coverage of the disappearance of khashoggi was tabloidesque and immature.
  • brown9-2 7y ago
    What does any of that have to do with Amazon?
    • resters 7y ago
      Bezos also owns Amazon. It shouldn’t really be relevant but unfortunately it is.
      • Supermancho 7y ago
        > In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places > Bezos should have stepped in to make certain that the WaPo improve the quality of its journalism The relevance is that this waffling over Oracle and AWS is born of an interview in WaPo? It has nothing to do with Amazon. Especially when you're commenting on the quality of WaPo journalism. The story exists without WaPo, but not without Amazon.
        • resters 7y ago
          WaPo has been weaponized against Trump by Bezos, or Bezos failed to stop it. For some reason doing solid investigative journalism is not a priority and instead rallying partisans around talking points and feel good, in-group stories takes precedence. FWIW I personally loathe Trump and would love to see him removed from power thanks to some solid investigative journalism.
• crb002 7y ago
  Amazon needs IBM mainframes in their data centers. They are still king of highly consistent and available systems.
  • dijit 7y ago
    I don’t think that the irony should be lost on you that this generation of service offerings do not guarantee reliability on purpose. The onus is on the developer to make a reliable system out of faulty pieces. What does more reliability mean when that was expressly not a target to begin with?
• cronix 7y ago
  I guess owning the Washington Post (Bezos paper), and its overwhelmingly anti Trump stance over the last 3 years, had its price. This is about Bezos IMHO, nothing else.
  • tootie 7y ago
    WaPo has been pretty fair if not overly gentle. Trump has mostly been flipping out over pretty bland and factual reporting that happens to be embarrassing for him because he keeps doing embarrassing things. And it's pretty grossly unethical to use your office to punish the media.
    • dnautics 7y ago
      I'm no fan of trump, but in what way have the media been punished by the office? I get that there have been incendiary tweets indirectly resulting in private citizens being assholes who have made death threats against the media. Clearly trump is an asshole for doing those things. Have there been any official punishments by the authorities that I'm not aware of?
      • gonesilent 7y ago
        Pulling press pases, just about ending press conferences, Calling everything fake news. Current admin hates the media unless it reads from it's talking points.
        • dnautics 7y ago
          Calling something fake news is not a punishment (you could construe almost any action done by a president as a punishment for someone under any criteria sufficiently vague as to admit that), and pulling a press pass is hardly a punsihment given how farcical this governments press conferences are. Have any journalists been jailed, murdered, fined, or had a business licence revoked by the state? These things happen, and also in 'civilised' nations like EU member states. If trump has done this I would certainly appreciate knowing so as to criticize the administration for it.
• danenania 7y ago
  I know we tend to think of cloud-agnostic architectures as over-engineering, YAGNI, etc., but for a massive, massively expensive, mission critical government cloud perhaps it’s a good idea? Apart from fail-over/redundancy benefits, it would avoid lock-in and drastically improve negotiating leverage that could force ongoing competitiveness and accountability. The engineering costs are significant but still a drop in the bucket compared to the size of these mega-contracts.
  • stcredzero 7y ago
    I think 3 way redundancy would be about right for a massive, mission critical government cloud. Apart from fail-over/redundancy benefits, it would avoid lock-in and drastically improve negotiating leverage that could force ongoing competitivenes and accountability. The effort could be open sourced, which would have industry-wide economic benefits.
    • zaphirplane 7y ago
      Yes 3 I’m thinking aws azure alibaba cloud. Which 3 are you thinking
      • mtgx 7y ago
        Alibaba cloud? For the US Pentagon? I can't tell if serious or not.
  • solatic 7y ago
    A contract the size of JEDI can (and probably is/will) build in that kind of independence as a requirement. Which isn't to say "Amazon must build and maintain an OpenStack implementation for DoD", but rather, that Amazon must turn over all APIs and source code used to build the implementation. Obviously, source code and APIs isn't enough to keep everything running - there still needs to be operational expertise within organizational memory - but the DoD would be empowered to start to take over operations and plan a migration to some other company maintaining the cloud infrastructure, if it were really untenable to renew the contract in a decade. Put it this way: there's an old aphorism about how owing the bank $1 million is your personal problem, owning the bank $1 billion is your bank's problem, and owing the bank $1 trillion is your country's problem. There would be a parallel for cloud infrastructure: if you have a $1 million cloud bill then you have a (vendor lock-in) problem; if you have a $500 million cloud bill then your vendor has a problem (because you represent a huge chunk of business that can evaporate if you move to on-prem); if you have a $1 billion cloud bill then the wider market would have a problem (because of the reverberating shock effects if your migration to cheaper infrastructure is unsuccessful). It's the textbook definition of something which is too big to fail.
• bhouston 7y ago
  The winner probably should have been AWS and close behind was azure and then Google. IBM and Oracle just are not at the same level but I do suspect they have the best sales teams for government deals.
  • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
    Google took themselves out of the running a long time ago.
• MarkMMullin 7y ago
  Oh Oracle - first your sales people came every year and jacked up the licenses, and we fled. Then you came up with plans to monetize Java, and we fled. And then this. Just die already, OK - your old business model is dead and your attempts to make a new one would even embarrass Elsevier
  • dehrmann 7y ago
    Don't forget ZFS. I seriously wish Google had bought Sun. Their cultures are so much more compatible, and while the Sun's hardware business didn't really mesh with Google's, it would have saved them some headaches with Oracle, and with the direction custom hardware is headed, might have become a real asset.
  • tootie 7y ago
    Larry Ellison is exactly the kind of guy Trump loves. He'll get one flattering phone call and the contract is theirs. Then $10B will turn into 100 before they hit the first release.
    • ethbro 7y ago
      For $10B, Oracle will gladly buy $8B of AWS services for you...
    • sam1r 7y ago
      It's a shame that this might actually be how it turns out.
    • JudgeWapner 7y ago
      Uranium One is exactly the type of company Hillary Clinton loves. Solyndra is exactly the kind of guy Obama loves. Both parties are the same.
  • meddlepal 7y ago
    > your old business model is dead and your attempts to make a new one would even embarrass Elsevier Sounds like wishcasting. Oracle is still be raking in money. The death of Oracle has long been a fan favorite on HN, but it's nowhere near being dead and their business model while perhaps antiquated by HN SaaS standards is alive and well and still seems to be working though they're diversifying into a number of new areas to deal with possible long term decline of Oracle DB.
• bmchnl 7y ago
  Half the shit the gov buys and mandates people use nobody doing work actually wants to use. Picking Oracle or some two week old fly by night hub zone contractor to handle this award would be typical. The unusual thing would be for it to actually go to a provider with services that are useful and people want to use. - speaking as someone who has done a significant amount of .gov work.
• blackflame7000 7y ago
  The government already contracted General Dynamics to build their own cloud called MilCloud. It had a lot of problems so naturally they are developing MilCloud2.0
• andy_ppp 7y ago
  What is it that the government is buying and how can the government ever trust (for this sort of thing) a private company. And surely you can set up faster (performance per buck) more secure data centres for 10 billion bucks? I just don’t get it, but I guess someone will say government can’t do anything and that’s enough.
• throwawayjava 7y ago
  I guess I don't understand the need for this contract in the first place. Is it normal in the private sector for companies to spend $1B/yr on cloud services? I feel like at that price point you're better off building out your own infra for most stuff, and using the cloud only for the remaining $10M - $100M fraction where you really do need dynamic scaling.