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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 acron

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
cowsandmilk 7y ago
> Dropbox uses AWS They very loudly left AWS several years ago, not aware of them going back.
- dehrmann 7y ago
  Wasn't it because they hit the scale where managing their own data store, renting colo space, etc. was cheaper than AWS? I've heard first-hand from some large players that self-hosting is cheaper. One is still-hosted, but one is on the cloud as a strategic bet.
  - jsty 7y ago
    Cutting out the middleman and their profit margins is almost always going to be cheaper if you have the requisite scale requirements. Depending on what your workloads are (particularly non-bandwidth intensive), that scale can be pretty damn large for compute infra nowadays.
  - doctorpangloss 7y ago
    Scale? Cheaper? Self-hosting a single server in San Francisco is cheaper than AWS too. AWS sells convenience and baked-in knowledge.
    - ethbro 7y ago
      Self-hosting is cheaper at both ends of scale. Enterprise clouds are cheaper if you're in the middle and/or quickly changing scale.
      - sam1r 7y ago
        IMO, I think you're undermining the multiple years of programming/sys-admin experience it would require to self-host + scale on your own. It's much more expensive when experience is minimized, as a function of time. Unless you've done it before, of course.
        7y ago
macspoofing 7y ago
>but nowhere in the piece does it mention Google's cloud services. Didn't Google kowtow to employee-activists who didn't want Google to work with the US military?
- dlgeek 7y ago
  That was for a different program (AI/ML stuff). They dropped out of JEDI because they couldn't meet a bunch of contract provisions in the RFP.
  - dekhn 7y ago
    No, the primary stated reason was that it wasn't compatible with their AI Principles. Secondary reason was contract. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-out-of-pentagons-10bn-jedi-cloud-race/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-...
    - provost 7y ago
      Well, that's just a clever PR lipservice move. They couldn't win the contract because they didn't have the ability to, so rather than failing embarrassingly, they blamed their exit on their brand-new AI principles to make themselves look good. This was the consensus on HN at the time.
tyingq 7y ago
"One can imagine all sorts of government databases running on IBM mainframes, using Oracle software." That's possible, but not common.
dekhn 7y ago
Google Cloud saw itself out the door in the JEDI competition quite some time ago. Competitively, this decision hurt their business in a number of ways, and led to a huge fallout (leadership churn).

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

cowsandmilk 7y ago

> Dropbox uses AWS They very loudly left AWS several years ago, not aware of them going back.

dehrmann 7y ago
Wasn't it because they hit the scale where managing their own data store, renting colo space, etc. was cheaper than AWS? I've heard first-hand from some large players that self-hosting is cheaper. One is still-hosted, but one is on the cloud as a strategic bet.
- jsty 7y ago
  Cutting out the middleman and their profit margins is almost always going to be cheaper if you have the requisite scale requirements. Depending on what your workloads are (particularly non-bandwidth intensive), that scale can be pretty damn large for compute infra nowadays.
- doctorpangloss 7y ago
  Scale? Cheaper? Self-hosting a single server in San Francisco is cheaper than AWS too. AWS sells convenience and baked-in knowledge.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    Self-hosting is cheaper at both ends of scale. Enterprise clouds are cheaper if you're in the middle and/or quickly changing scale.
    - sam1r 7y ago
      IMO, I think you're undermining the multiple years of programming/sys-admin experience it would require to self-host + scale on your own. It's much more expensive when experience is minimized, as a function of time. Unless you've done it before, of course.
      - 7y ago

macspoofing 7y ago

>but nowhere in the piece does it mention Google's cloud services. Didn't Google kowtow to employee-activists who didn't want Google to work with the US military?

dlgeek 7y ago
That was for a different program (AI/ML stuff). They dropped out of JEDI because they couldn't meet a bunch of contract provisions in the RFP.
- dekhn 7y ago
  No, the primary stated reason was that it wasn't compatible with their AI Principles. Secondary reason was contract. https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-out-of-pentagons-10bn-jedi-cloud-race/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-...
  - provost 7y ago
    Well, that's just a clever PR lipservice move. They couldn't win the contract because they didn't have the ability to, so rather than failing embarrassingly, they blamed their exit on their brand-new AI principles to make themselves look good. This was the consensus on HN at the time.

tyingq 7y ago

"One can imagine all sorts of government databases running on IBM mainframes, using Oracle software." That's possible, but not common.

dekhn 7y ago

Google Cloud saw itself out the door in the JEDI competition quite some time ago. Competitively, this decision hurt their business in a number of ways, and led to a huge fallout (leadership churn).