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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 reas

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.
- acdha 7y ago
  Here’s the civilian pay scale – think of how it compares with AWS or Google: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/2019/general-schedule/ https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Now, think of the political climate: there’ve been decades trying to “trim waste” by steering money to the private sector, where efficiency is taken as a matter of faith. First you’d need to hire the technical leadership to properly plan something like that and then hire all of the people who’d build it, not to mention procuring all of the hardware & data centers, etc. You’re looking at years before you have a positive return on any of that – and all the while, every big contractor is going to have their lobbyists talking about how it’s a waste of money compared to going with them. NASA tried this a decade ago with Nebula, which was part of the early OpenStack history. I don’t know exactly what happened with that but the people I know working on NASA projects are all using AWS.

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.
acdha 7y ago
Here’s the civilian pay scale – think of how it compares with AWS or Google: https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries-wages/2019/general-schedule/ https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries... Now, think of the political climate: there’ve been decades trying to “trim waste” by steering money to the private sector, where efficiency is taken as a matter of faith. First you’d need to hire the technical leadership to properly plan something like that and then hire all of the people who’d build it, not to mention procuring all of the hardware & data centers, etc. You’re looking at years before you have a positive return on any of that – and all the while, every big contractor is going to have their lobbyists talking about how it’s a waste of money compared to going with them. NASA tried this a decade ago with Nebula, which was part of the early OpenStack history. I don’t know exactly what happened with that but the people I know working on NASA projects are all using AWS.