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Pentagon cancels $10B cloud contract that Amazon, Microsoft were fighting over
- zod50 5y ago> The Pentagon said in the press release that it still needs enterprise-scale cloud capability and announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract, adding that they are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs.
- fairramone 5y agoWow, that has got to sting for Google Cloud and Oracle.
- snug 5y agoGoogle Cloud bowed out of the race several years ago 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-...
- briffle 5y agoGoogle withdrew from the original bid due to objections by its employees.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 5y agoGoogle was already considered unlikely to win before its withdrawal, so I'd be hesitant to attribute the withdrawal primarily to this. Unlike AWS and Azure, Google doesn't offer any GovCloud regions, only Fedramp which seems to apply to unclassified data only.
- bradleyjg 5y agoIf GCP have fedramp high that’s roughly equivalent to AWS govcloud (fedramp high ~= IL4). AWS and Azure also have IL6 regions (able to hold secret information). Finally AWS runs a top secret cloud for the intelligence community. I believe Azure announced a similar project but not when it’ll be open for business.
- 0xy 5y agoThat was an excuse and a convenient cover story. GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government. Couple that with the leaked plans to shut the thing down because it's an abject failure (it's a money pit for Google), and why would you want to be on the platform of certain disaster? I've had demos from GCP sales reps, and the platform is shambolic. It doesn't even work during sales presentations.
- ethbr0 5y agoGCP has some good bits. They're just running into the same problem everyone had catching Windows: it's really hard to compete from a fresh start with something that's been incrementally improved over years of significant use. Especially when you're Google (our customers aren't as smart as us) competing with Amazon.
- Crash0v3rid3 5y ago> GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government. Not sure where you’ve gotten this information from. GCP serves many “large organizations” including government agencies [0]. > I've had demos from GCP sales reps, and the platform is shambolic. It doesn't even work during sales presentations. This feels very hyperbolic to me. Either way, demos don’t always work out the way you intend. [0] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/government https://cloud.google.com/solutions/government
- 0xy 5y agoYour example of a "large organization" is the state of Arizona? Australia Post, a tiny regional mail delivery company? What's your definition of "large"? Also, it's evident they cannot service those customers. Australia Post has a large contract with AWS. Whoops. I've worked in many large organizations. I've received GCP pitches. I've participated in evaluations of GCP as a technology solution. It's substantially worse than Azure, plus according to their leaked massive losses on the product it'll be shuttered this decade. >This feels very hyperbolic to me Their dashboards are typical Angular heavyweight clunk, with confusing error messages, infinite loading spinners and things break constantly. It's been discussed here extensively. [1] Their actual decent products (BigQuery) are hamstrung by the rest of the failing platform. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357409 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357409
- RKearney 5y agoA memo went out last year about all federal networks supporting IPv6 only in the coming years. Since Google's cloud doesn't really support IPv6 at all, I don't think they were going to win the contract anyway.
- arenaninja 5y agoLooks like good news for VMware, I believe one of the few players focusing in multi-cloud setups
- sofixa 5y agoEveryone bar AWS is focusing on multicloud. And VMware's offerings are utter shite and very poor features wise ( where it matters), so I doubt they'll be impacted. ( Their offerings were so bad they were forced to sell their vSphere as a service arm to a low cost hosting provider. Even with the popularity of that dumpster fire in DCs and most companies moving away from DCs they still couldn't capture any market share)
- paulddraper 5y agoAnd IBM Cloud.
- mtgx 5y agoJoint War-fighter? I guess the DoD is no longer shy about its intentions for US' permanent state of war... Next up: DoD's name change to DoW?
- hintymad 5y agoI can understand Google employees' passion to curb the power of military. I myself strongly support keeping government's power in check too. But the hatred towards the military, to the point of actively sabotaging military's effort to improve itself? That I don't understand. I really wish those employees travel back in time to experience the European people's life under Mongolian's reign, or the Aztec's life when Spaniards attacked, or the life of people in Manchurian when Nurgaci's tribe was rising in the early 17th century, or the life of Chinese people merely a hundred years ago when Japanese invaded. Shouldn't it mean something when millions of innocent people were slaughtered in a matter of years, or when a civilization (especially a more advanced one) got destroyed, or when a nation's human rights were stepped on? P.S., it's worth mentioning that it was the Manchurian who restored slavery in Qing Dynasty. The word Nucai in Chinese or 명사 in Korean, meaning Your Slave, was such an honorary title that for more than 300 years until early 20th century only those who were trusted by the royals could use. Yeah, don't wanna be a slave? Build a good army.
- roflulz 5y agoisn't the US Military the equivalent of the "Manchu" here? (The US Military wiped out the natives, took all their land, and brought and enforced slavery on this land?) Didn't the US just annex Hawaii as an official state a few years ago? Isn't all of California land that the military just kinda stole from Mexico?
- neither_color 5y agoThe answer to all of your questions is no, but this kind of discussion belongs on reddit anyways.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 14u2c 5y ago>Didn't the US just annex Hawaii as an official state a few years ago? I suppose if you consider 1898 a few years ago.
- FridayoLeary 5y agoAnd if they both say no...?
- paxys 5y agoThey'll be forced to do what they should have done from the get go – invest into building their own infrastructure.
- HWR_14 5y agoConsidering Amazon was suing over the previous contract, and MS won iy I don't see why either wouldn't bid. The money is huge.
- rk06 5y agoThen, it means that they are run by people who are not blinded by greed, and care about earth .... Ahh who am I kidding! They will both say yes. Amazon even sued the government for it
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoNot surprised. Redoing this drops any ability to suspect Trump's tampering, and in the past three or four years, they likely have a wish list of adjustments anyways. Starting over allows them to address both.
- hobofan 5y agoApparently the Jedi in the header should be capitalized as JEDI and is unrelated to the religion.
- adolph 5y agoAre clever acronyms an end run around copyright claims?
- shadilay 5y agoIn this case wouldn't it be a trademark instead of copyright?
- adrianmonk 5y agoIn which case, there's probably no conflict because you don't infringe trademarks if you're in totally different markets. Which is why it's OK that there's a Columbia encyclopedia and a Columbia sportswear. Or Fisker scissors and Fisker electric cars.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoIt's probably challenging to argue the government is infringing Disney's copyright: It's not a remotely related field of industry, it's not for profit, and the US government is not technically able to hold IP rights itself to anything. "Star Wars" itself was the name of a previous defense program, so, I'm sure this debate was had out decades ago.
- ARandomerDude 5y ago"Star Wars" was actually not the name of the program, it was a derogatory nickname coined by Ted Kennedy, akin to calling the ACA "Obamacare." [1] The formal name of the program was "Strategic Defense Initiative," or "SDI." 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#Controversy_and_criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#C...
- bpodgursky 5y agoSeems like the right move, and also fits my overall investment thesis: "Never bet against Bezos*" *unless he is trying to launch rockets, which somehow he catastrophically sucks at
- jedberg 5y agoFWIW, Bezos stopped being the CEO yesterday. So technically this is Andy's win...
- quesera 5y ago> rockets ... catastrophically I admire the faith he demonstrates in his team, by being among the first human lives at risk in a launched Blue Origin vehicle. But maybe 57 is just the new 27.
- bpodgursky 5y agoFair enough. But suborbital hops are so 2010. Not gonna get out of bed for anything less than LEO.
- imglorp 5y agoYeah, it seems suborbital is really only good for tourism and getting good rocketry practice. At least they're on the path to orbital: New Glenn appears to be late 2022 with some customers booked in 2023.
- bpodgursky 5y agoI will believe literally nothing about the New Glenn until it launches. Not to mention landing the first stage, which was the only part which made this rocket competitive, and is _extremely_ hard to get right on the first try.
- hourislate 5y agoSpace X will be landing the Starship on the Moon and Bozo will still be flying 3-4 people to the stratosphere. Guy should stick to what he is good at, running a sweat shop and trinket delivery. I put more faith in Boeing as I find Blue Origin more of a C player.
- azinman2 5y agoWhile I don’t know the specifics of JEDI, it seems problematic that military data is being stored in a civilian center at all, and one that’s likely to be internet connected. Every day practically we see a new breach, and there’s two things in common: a weak point in software, and the internet. Will JEDI be completely air gapped?
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoThe expectations placed on military compliant service is pretty significant, in that it's generally going to be dedicated boxes and networks and significant controls to prevent any easy movement between enterprise or consumer users and government. (Most government cloud customers are already on a pretty separated area from everything else.) But presumably Internet connectivity is the entire point of why they'd want a cloud contract: The government already has servers in buildings. It sounds like they particularly want the global reach of a cloud service, probably for activities intentionally intended to be on the Internet. I mean, bear in mind, if you're a state-level actor that engages in cyberattacks, you need to be on the Internet to do them... Not saying that's the purpose of the JEDI contract, just that... there's plenty of scenarios where the military wants Internet-connected things.
- shadowgovt 5y agoIn taking a contract like this, I (as a company owner) would be more concerned with the thought that I just added my datacenter to someone's priority target list. On the other hand, let's be honest... In strategy for a modern war, Microsoft and Amazon's major datacenters are already on someone's priority target list.
- ocdtrekkie 5y agoYeah, the thing is too, global actors have already learned that attacking corporate entities is a really good way to screw with our public sector too. And it's a lot easier to wreak havoc by attacking major municipalities than trying to inject code onto an F-35, and arguably, the former is capable of doing more damage than the latter.
- jimbob45 5y ago> Last year, the Pentagon’s inspector general released a report saying that the award did not appear to be influenced by the White House. However, the inspector general noted in the 313-page report published in April 2020, that it had limited cooperation from White House officials throughout its review and, as a result, it could not complete its assessment of allegations of ethical misconduct. Everyone knows the Bezos-run WaPo is Pravda for the Democratic Party. It’s not a huge stretch to think Bezos is being repaid for his 2020 contributions. It really feels like both MS and Amazon should have been kept out of bidding for this out of CoI fears.
- danghypocrite 5y agoAny comment like this against republicans or libertareans would get somebody banned by @dang. Hacker news is basically Gab for nazi programmers.
- CameronNemo 5y agoWaPo is propaganda for Bezos, but even then he tries to pretend that there is some editorial independence. WaPo would only be pro-Democrats as long as it benefited Bezos, or if individual journalists leaned that way. I really doubt there is a quid pro quo of a $10bn contract for what limited sway Bezos has over WaPo. If anything, the fact that Oracle did not receive the original contract shows how limited political contributions were in affecting the outcome of this contract. Larry Ellison was a big financier of the last administration.
- chickenpotpie 5y agoWhere does this myth that Bezos is giant Democratic Party supporter come from? Amazon and it’s subsidiaries donate to both major political parties and many members of the Democratic Party are very vocally against Bezos.
- jaywalk 5y agoIt comes from the fact that his newspaper is far-left. But you are correct in that it doesn't appear to reflect his personal political ideology.
- CameronNemo 5y agoI wonder what impact Graviton had on this decision. Seems like self designed chips would be attractive from a cyber defense perspective.
- supertrope 5y agoIntel is already made in USA.
- bigcorp-slave 5y agoOh for fucks sake. This is what, Amazon’s third chance at the trough? At what point is it cheating? Disclosure: long MSFT.
- enraged_camel 5y agoYou can blame Trump for it. He tainted the contract process because he hates Bezos (who owns WaPo). This was the key point that Amazon focused on in their objection. edit: re: downvotes - the article states this in the sixth paragraph
- ralph84 5y agoExcept there was never any evidence that Trump got involved, even after multiple independent reviews. MSFT just made a better proposal and AMZN was able to use the broken protest process to tie things up long enough to make canceling the fastest way forward for the DoD.
- Thaxll 5y ago"A federal court said on Wednesday that it did not dismiss the possibility that former President Donald J. Trump interfered in the awarding of a military cloud-computing contract worth $10 billion, a decision that could result in the overhaul of a long-running effort to modernize technology at the Defense Department." https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/technology/trump-jedi-pentagon-microsoft-amazon.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/technology/trump-jedi-pen...
- pyuser583 5y agoI can’t read the article due to paywall, but “did not dismiss the idea that” is different from “there is evidence that”. Can you summarize/quote the relevant parts of the article? What evidence did the court find?
- slownews45 5y agoThey key thing was the court saw enough smoke to keep case alive AND it looked like recently was going to force some disclosure around communications from whitehouse (whitehouse has variously claimed no involvement).
- jhickok 5y agoWhat a tremendous waste of time and resources for taxpayers-- nearly 2 years of litigation and all for nothing. Shame on everyone involved.
- the-dude 5y agoDoes not register on the scale of say, your twenty year war.
- pstuart 5y agoThe one that we're trying to slip out the back door and pretend never happened?
- johnnyfived 5y agoWhat a completely useless and patronizing comment
- adrr 5y agoCompared to what? They lost at most what a few million in litigation costs compared the F35 project which is 1.7 trillion.
- paxys 5y agoBetter to waste a few million in litigation than $10B in useless contracts.
- arenaninja 5y agoThis ignores the time value of money. What if the couple of years prevents numerous security intrusions by foreign entities? It's not as if MSFT doesn't have the expertise or the manpower to fulfill the contract
- paxys 5y agoConsidering the DoD themselves say that the terms of the contract are outdated and they don't need it anymore, I'd trust their decision over random online comments.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoAll this does is add friction. I've worked on defense programs that were "shared" between contractors and it's massively stifling on top of the security constraints.
- ethbr0 5y agoSee the Ben Rich's story about the government man showing up to the crash-speed SR-71 program. "Mr. Johnson, I don't give a damn whether your plane ever gets built. But my forms will be signed and procedures will be followed."
- icegreentea2 5y agoBen Rich's stories should be considered in context. If you take his stories at face value, then the Skunk Works were significantly more competent AND HONEST than any of their competitors, or the rest of Lockheed! He found the bullshit tiring because he felt that he didn't deserve to deal with it, because he trusted in his own competency and honesty. You can see how all the pieces fall together. Somehow, the government has reached a default stance of not really trusting in the honesty (and maybe competence) of their contractors. And frankly, Ben Rich didn't really believe in his competitors either. He just didn't care because he only writes about projects that he's also competing in, so he thinks that his competence will carry him through (which it generally did... not for the F-16 though lol). What about all the competitions that doesn't have the strangely competence and honest vendor? DoD saw what a gong-show single source could be (look at F-35). They figure multi-vendor, open architecture is the way to mitigate that risk.
- stoicjumbotron 5y agoWhy did Microsoft's shares go down and Amazon's went up?
- karmasimida 5y agoBecause it means MSFT now didn't have this exclusive contract with Pentagon? Edit: DARPA -> Pentagon
- jnwatson 5y agoThis contract is not related to DARPA.
- karmasimida 5y agoI mean Pentagon, edited
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- Ericson2314 5y agoThe state should procure an entirely open source / public domain cloud stack that would commeditize the "cloud" space allowing any org to run data centers with a standardized interface. The state should then run their own data centers in-house with the stock design rather than outsourcing those operational costs This would be far better for society. Compute-for-all.
- adrr 5y agoWhere would they get the talent and expertise to do that? Whats the most you can make at government job? $170k? How much money do engineers make at AWS? I just had a recruiter call me for architect role that was $500k in compensation a year.
- Ericson2314 5y agoFor what? The initial design work and a demo deployment can be outsourced. After the design is proven then cheaper sysadmins can run the thing. Also, the fact that government jobs are so capped like that is a conspiracy to make the public sector suck, basically. We should fix that too, but I recognize it cannot be done in time, hence allowing that the design work to be outsourced.
- ethbr0 5y agoThe problem with cleaving contractor deliverables from suitability results is that you remove all incentive for quality work. Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.
- Ericson2314 5y ago> AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS hahaha ----- I am trying to structure the contract to avoid this stuff, by making the deliverables include both the contractors running their own working deployment, and the government also running their own. For the latter, there should be a tech transfer period where the contracter needs to do training and promptly answer questions, and then a government independence period where the contractor is not allowed to intervene at all to prove the knowledge has actually been transferred, and government isn't entering an IT-support protection racket. Only then is full payout given. Yes, that means finishing the entire project will take quite a bit longer than doing all the dev work. Yes, that also means the project is riskier for the contractor and has less ongoing reward, and so they will need to be paid more initially. But it's worth it in the end. If there is some gotcha here where the private sector can get out with too much proprietary IP or a weak and dependent customer in the government, do let me know, that is not my intent. I'm trying to envision a transitional project to get out of today's privatized world to one with better US state capacity.
- pyuser583 5y agoThis really sucks. They’re cancelling it because they don’t need it anymore. They need something like it, but the requirements have become archaic. The fact that this was kept up in litigation until the technology became archaic is really, really disturbing.
- ars 5y ago> The fact that this was kept up in litigation until the technology became archaic is really, really disturbing. And also, in a way, really really good. It gave them time to know what they actually need and not waste money on something they (incorrectly) thought they needed.
- lumost 5y agoThis can also describe almost every software project in history. By my estimation any project delay will incur a redesign which is 50% due to new technology being developed and 50% due to different parties in the design discussion. Even in Defense contracting land, If you delay a contract by 5 years then nobody from the original proposal will still be around. Had the contract originally gone through there would probably be incremental development to keep it up with the times.
- daxfohl 5y agoGeesh, I left Microsoft in December, but back then it was all hands on deck, drop everything else, to meet this contract, and I doubt much has changed. I had a feeling it would be a bad end even if JEDI paid off, because so much else was being neglected. Now though....
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- daxfohl 5y agoNot to mention employee morale
- senectus1 5y agoIt'll be mostly alright, they'll pivot and some of it will keep going.
- Bajeezus 5y agoThe airgapped clouds existed before the JEDI contract. There were, and still are, other DoD contracts, JEDI is just the largest of them
- cletus 5y agoCan we just stop writing nonsense like this? > Shares of Microsoft were down about 0.4% following the news So the MSFT share price changed well within the norms of daily volatility. It doesn't mean anything.
- jhayward 5y agoTo the contrary, it means there was not much material impact on the stock value. It answers the question: "What effect was there on the stock?"
- jedberg 5y agoNot really. If you look at the chart, there was a huge spike in trading the moment the news broke, which then dropped it .4% instantly. That's not normal. FWIW the stock is now back at what it was before the news broke.
- cletus 5y agoBut they didn't mention the volume. That might've been noteworthy, no?
- bidirectional 5y agoI wonder if this is meant to show a lack of impact on Microsoft's share price? Because I can't imagine any reporter at CNBC thinking that a drop to levels last seen on Friday lunchtime is notable.
- Traster 5y agoI think it’s more likely just something in the style guide that all articles on events impacting public companies note the impact on share price. It’s not a comment on whether it’s news in one direction or the other , it’s just their standard.
- tylersmith 5y agoThat's information people want to know after reading a story like this from an outlet like CNBC.
- Shadonototro 5y agothat's what happen when develop a bloat driven culture
- nonameiguess 5y agoThis whole thing is a joke. I don't think any of us working as DoD developers give much of a crap what cloud provider you force us to use. But just pick something, anything. Quit switching the ground out from underneath us every couple years. The present state being the way it is, we're forced to be provider-agnostic to effectively everything, which means we need to stand up our own self-hosted services down to running our own Kubernetes engines and deploying our own NFS servers and database servers, and the only managed services we use at all are the ones to deploy the basic network infrastructure and VMs. Linode can give us servers for probably 1/10th the cost of AWS or Azure if you're not going to actually let us use any managed services. And people want to know why all defense projects are constantly behind schedule and over budget.
- AndrewKemendo 5y ago>I don't think any of us working as DoD developers give much of a crap what cloud provider you force us to use The fundamental problem is that you aren't the one choosing or buying these services. The "people who give a crap" is some mix of political and industrial people with a very light sprinkling of high level program management which are driving the requirements. So it has nothing - literally nothing - to do with what you as the actual person who is doing the work, want or need to be effective. This is how the government acquisitions process is written into law unfortunately and I've pushed hard within the government to change that in the past (to some very limited success).
- devonkim 5y agoThe purchaser / decision maker is not the user / practitioner dichotomy exists to a lesser extent in private commercial sector. It’s part of the problems of enterprise software in general
- nonameiguess 5y agoYes. Unfortunately, I'm way too aware of this problem. As far as I'm concerned, it's the biggest problem facing government acquisitions, the fact that any provider's "customer" is always an acquisition office and not its actual users. It's even worse for IC enterprise services, because only your acquisition office has any say in what you prioritize for work and they're the only group of people in the government you're authorized to talk to, but then when you release something, any one of potentially hundreds of external stakeholders can all veto you from going into ops, but you can't solicit their feedback during development.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- myrandomcomment 5y agoSeems to me that the DoD should build a cloud agnostic solution.
- swiley 5y agoHow hard is it really to just run QEMU?