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"In 2010, DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics said that "an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on whom we rely to deliver finished genomic da

"In 2010, DNA sequencing company Complete Genomics said that "an interruption of services by Amazon Web Services, on whom we rely to deliver finished genomic data to our customers, would result in our customers not receiving their data on time." Gaming company Zynga warned about how its AWS foundation could quickly vanish when it filed the prospectus for its initial public offering in 2011. "AWS may terminate the agreement without cause by providing 180 days prior written notice, and may terminate the agreement with 30 days prior written notice for cause, including any material default or breach of the agreement by us that we do not cure within the 30-day period," Zynga said. AWS can even terminate or suspend its agreement with a customer immediately under certain circumstances as it did in 2010 with Wikileaks, pointing to violations of AWS' terms of service." Wonder if they can cancel their government contracts so easily. When people debate the merits of "on-prem" versus AWS on HN they rarely focus on the contract terms.

gabereiser 6y ago
I led cloud transformations at a Fortune 500 and we did make sure to look over contracts and have business agreements in place. YMMV though as we had some weight behind our needs as a government contract would. If you just sign up with a credit card I’m sure it’s different as mentioned however, a lot has changed since 2010. They were warned repeatedly and ignored it.
- apple_innocent 6y ago
  Did you have any "disaster recovery" plans in place, what you would do if the cloud failed. I think looking at this issue with the example of "Parler" may be missing the point. The issue worth debating is surely not whether Amazon made the right decision. Of course they did. The issue worth discussing is who gets to make this decision in light of what the decision implies. Due to how much businesses are choosing[1] to rely on companies like Google and Amazon as service providers, these "tech" companies can easily kill other businesses by denying service, without violating any laws in the process. These "tech" company middlemen are generally not treated like utilities under existing laws but the question is whether they are being treated as such by customers, the public. 1. Perhaps not so much consciously choosing as being persuaded by tech company salespeople and, IMHO, biased "media coverage" (=hype).
  - gabereiser 6y ago
    Disaster recovery was a hot topic. Most transformations kept DR within the cloud. A few architectures wanted to fail over to another public cloud (AWS->Azure). The issue of “de-platforming” still exists. Most wanted to get rid of the on-prem costs without keeping a rack around for DR. You’re absolutely right that the real meat of discussion needs to be how a cloud company like AWS makes these decisions? What criteria? What protections does a consumer have? What about data? There’s a lot of unknowns there. AWS’ Business Agreement you can get their legal and your legal to agree upon, doesn’t really touch on all those points. Further, AWS’ has a canned agreement they use and don’t make concessions even if you’re a Fortune 500.
    - znkynz 6y ago
      Enterprise customers, of signficant volume, do indeed get custom agreements. (Or at least, they used to be able to do so.)
      - apple_innocent 6y ago
        Are the terms confidential. Can customers "compare notes" to see if they are getting less favourable terms than others.
        georgyo 6y ago
        They all include a NDA about the agreement itself. So yes, the terms are confidential. Even the fact that a particular that you may or may not have an agreement at all is confidential.
        apple_innocent 6y ago
        Are the terms of the NDA confidential. With respect to the fact of the existence of an agreement being confidential information, usually an NDA will only apply to information that has not already become public through no fault of either party.
noncoml 6y ago
My suggestion that governments shouldn't rely on third-parties for their infra, didn't go down well with HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520
- apple_innocent 6y ago
  FWIW, I agree with your opinion. That includes not letting politicians onto these websites to do campaigning. This was a big mistake. The number of former public servants who have gone to work for Facebook is alarming, IMO. The number of possible future public servants who have worked there is perhaps even more worrisome.
  - voicedYoda 6y ago
    It's been a revolving door for a long long time
    - slg 6y ago
      The question is how do you fix that? We should want domain experts in a lot of these government roles, but the primary way you become an expert in an industry is working in that industry. Let's image we put a ban in place to prevent this revolving door. Why would someone working in the industry be willing to forfeit their post-government career, especially if they are a political appointee and might only have the role for a few years until the next election? That is a huge disincentive to participate in governing and will likely lead to more career politicians and bureaucrats which isn't exactly an ideal situation.
      - jclulow 6y ago
        I think for starters it's important to recognise that the expectation of a "post-government" career is itself a part of this problem. If we instead built long term competence within public institutions, including competitive remuneration and career development like training programmes, there wouldn't be a need to have a door between the private and public sector quite as much in the first place. The reward should be delivered in situ for continued constructive service, not be an upgrade to a private sector gig after holding your nose and/or making decisions you feel will be looked upon favourably by future employers. Private and public sector employees could collaborate where it makes sense, just like companies sometimes collaborate on shared initiatives like working groups or open source projects. Government can actually work better than it does in the US -- as it does in other countries -- but one must first accept the ideological premise, which seems to be what holds the country back.
apple_innocent 6y ago
s/cancel/terminate https://www.acquisition.gov/print/11832 https://www.acquisition.gov/print/11832 (I am not knowedgeable when it comes to FAR, maybe someone reading HN knows more.)
echelon 6y ago
Building off-prem is one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of our industry. Unless you stick to S3, EC2, or EKS, you wind up designing your infra for freaky weirdware architectures like Lambda that won't run anywhere else. Your costs are double what they would be if you just had a platform team imaging and updating servers. Costs can grow unexpectedly, too. Why anyone is using this trap is beyond me. I guess since folks spend their two year tours of duty at companies before rotating off to some other position elsewhere, they just don't care. This is Oracle all over again.
chii 6y ago
> When people debate the merits of "on-prem" versus AWS on HN they rarely focus on the contract terms. if this had been electricity or water, instead of AWS compute resources, the tune would've been different. I think the gov't just need to catch up with regulation - that infrastructure/utility providers cannot terminate without cause in the same way that an electrical utility cannot terminate a premise of electricity abruptly and without cause.
snowwrestler 6y ago
Are there enterprise contracts that do not have provisions under which the supplier can end the relationship for cause? I have a hard time believing the lawyers for a supplier would let them sign a contract that requires them to provide service to a customer under any and all circumstances with no way out. Edit to add: if you stick servers in a colo data center instead of signing with AWS, doesn’t the data center contract give them the right to evict you under certain circumstances? If you lease office space, doesn’t the lease usually have terms under which the property owner can evict you for cause?
- 3np 6y ago
  Minimum notice is pretty common by law, for one thing.
- apple_innocent 6y ago
  Analogies (such as leasing data center and commercial real estate) should probably account for the availability/lack of viable alternatives. For example, how much choice, what options does the consumer have in selecting its "service providers".
  - CPLX 6y ago
    > If you lease office space, doesn’t the lease usually have terms under which the property owner can evict you for cause? Indeed. But almost invariably you’ll have to go to a court to do it.
eunos 6y ago
Gov is pretty sure has a far stronger leverage than AWS. For example, if AWS cancels unilaterally Gov contracts, Gov will show that as Exhibit A of the need of Anti Trust. Anyway, if Gov can procure cloud services, they should procure multiple providers and design their service as a cloud agnostic system.
- HenryKissinger 6y ago
  The government can shut down Amazon. Amazon can't shut down the government.
  - anewaccount2021 6y ago
    Stop delivering packages for two weeks, blame the govt...you'll find out very quickly that brown boxes are a real vector of power
    - jojobas 6y ago
      Nope. Shut down every other website and blame the government, on the other hand...

gabereiser 6y ago

I led cloud transformations at a Fortune 500 and we did make sure to look over contracts and have business agreements in place. YMMV though as we had some weight behind our needs as a government contract would. If you just sign up with a credit card I’m sure it’s different as mentioned however, a lot has changed since 2010. They were warned repeatedly and ignored it.

apple_innocent 6y ago
Did you have any "disaster recovery" plans in place, what you would do if the cloud failed. I think looking at this issue with the example of "Parler" may be missing the point. The issue worth debating is surely not whether Amazon made the right decision. Of course they did. The issue worth discussing is who gets to make this decision in light of what the decision implies. Due to how much businesses are choosing[1] to rely on companies like Google and Amazon as service providers, these "tech" companies can easily kill other businesses by denying service, without violating any laws in the process. These "tech" company middlemen are generally not treated like utilities under existing laws but the question is whether they are being treated as such by customers, the public. 1. Perhaps not so much consciously choosing as being persuaded by tech company salespeople and, IMHO, biased "media coverage" (=hype).
- gabereiser 6y ago
  Disaster recovery was a hot topic. Most transformations kept DR within the cloud. A few architectures wanted to fail over to another public cloud (AWS->Azure). The issue of “de-platforming” still exists. Most wanted to get rid of the on-prem costs without keeping a rack around for DR. You’re absolutely right that the real meat of discussion needs to be how a cloud company like AWS makes these decisions? What criteria? What protections does a consumer have? What about data? There’s a lot of unknowns there. AWS’ Business Agreement you can get their legal and your legal to agree upon, doesn’t really touch on all those points. Further, AWS’ has a canned agreement they use and don’t make concessions even if you’re a Fortune 500.
  - znkynz 6y ago
    Enterprise customers, of signficant volume, do indeed get custom agreements. (Or at least, they used to be able to do so.)
    - apple_innocent 6y ago
      Are the terms confidential. Can customers "compare notes" to see if they are getting less favourable terms than others.
      - georgyo 6y ago
        They all include a NDA about the agreement itself. So yes, the terms are confidential. Even the fact that a particular that you may or may not have an agreement at all is confidential.
        apple_innocent 6y ago
        Are the terms of the NDA confidential. With respect to the fact of the existence of an agreement being confidential information, usually an NDA will only apply to information that has not already become public through no fault of either party.

noncoml 6y ago

My suggestion that governments shouldn't rely on third-parties for their infra, didn't go down well with HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25639520

apple_innocent 6y ago
FWIW, I agree with your opinion. That includes not letting politicians onto these websites to do campaigning. This was a big mistake. The number of former public servants who have gone to work for Facebook is alarming, IMO. The number of possible future public servants who have worked there is perhaps even more worrisome.
- voicedYoda 6y ago
  It's been a revolving door for a long long time
  - slg 6y ago
    The question is how do you fix that? We should want domain experts in a lot of these government roles, but the primary way you become an expert in an industry is working in that industry. Let's image we put a ban in place to prevent this revolving door. Why would someone working in the industry be willing to forfeit their post-government career, especially if they are a political appointee and might only have the role for a few years until the next election? That is a huge disincentive to participate in governing and will likely lead to more career politicians and bureaucrats which isn't exactly an ideal situation.
    - jclulow 6y ago
      I think for starters it's important to recognise that the expectation of a "post-government" career is itself a part of this problem. If we instead built long term competence within public institutions, including competitive remuneration and career development like training programmes, there wouldn't be a need to have a door between the private and public sector quite as much in the first place. The reward should be delivered in situ for continued constructive service, not be an upgrade to a private sector gig after holding your nose and/or making decisions you feel will be looked upon favourably by future employers. Private and public sector employees could collaborate where it makes sense, just like companies sometimes collaborate on shared initiatives like working groups or open source projects. Government can actually work better than it does in the US -- as it does in other countries -- but one must first accept the ideological premise, which seems to be what holds the country back.

apple_innocent 6y ago

s/cancel/terminate https://www.acquisition.gov/print/11832 https://www.acquisition.gov/print/11832 (I am not knowedgeable when it comes to FAR, maybe someone reading HN knows more.)

echelon 6y ago

Building off-prem is one of the biggest boondoggles in the history of our industry. Unless you stick to S3, EC2, or EKS, you wind up designing your infra for freaky weirdware architectures like Lambda that won't run anywhere else. Your costs are double what they would be if you just had a platform team imaging and updating servers. Costs can grow unexpectedly, too. Why anyone is using this trap is beyond me. I guess since folks spend their two year tours of duty at companies before rotating off to some other position elsewhere, they just don't care. This is Oracle all over again.

chii 6y ago

> When people debate the merits of "on-prem" versus AWS on HN they rarely focus on the contract terms. if this had been electricity or water, instead of AWS compute resources, the tune would've been different. I think the gov't just need to catch up with regulation - that infrastructure/utility providers cannot terminate without cause in the same way that an electrical utility cannot terminate a premise of electricity abruptly and without cause.

snowwrestler 6y ago

Are there enterprise contracts that do not have provisions under which the supplier can end the relationship for cause? I have a hard time believing the lawyers for a supplier would let them sign a contract that requires them to provide service to a customer under any and all circumstances with no way out. Edit to add: if you stick servers in a colo data center instead of signing with AWS, doesn’t the data center contract give them the right to evict you under certain circumstances? If you lease office space, doesn’t the lease usually have terms under which the property owner can evict you for cause?

3np 6y ago
Minimum notice is pretty common by law, for one thing.
apple_innocent 6y ago
Analogies (such as leasing data center and commercial real estate) should probably account for the availability/lack of viable alternatives. For example, how much choice, what options does the consumer have in selecting its "service providers".
- CPLX 6y ago
  > If you lease office space, doesn’t the lease usually have terms under which the property owner can evict you for cause? Indeed. But almost invariably you’ll have to go to a court to do it.

eunos 6y ago

Gov is pretty sure has a far stronger leverage than AWS. For example, if AWS cancels unilaterally Gov contracts, Gov will show that as Exhibit A of the need of Anti Trust. Anyway, if Gov can procure cloud services, they should procure multiple providers and design their service as a cloud agnostic system.

HenryKissinger 6y ago
The government can shut down Amazon. Amazon can't shut down the government.
- anewaccount2021 6y ago
  Stop delivering packages for two weeks, blame the govt...you'll find out very quickly that brown boxes are a real vector of power
  - jojobas 6y ago
    Nope. Shut down every other website and blame the government, on the other hand...