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How the CIA Partnered With Amazon and Changed Intelligence
- jrochkind1 12y agoA technical-business question: So, all the hardware is ' behind the IC’s firewall' -- that means, in dedicated government data centers, right? And yet "they’ll only pay for what they use." So... Amazon needs to build out capacity to handle expected demand with servers that can only be used by the IC, but can only charge the IC for the servers it's currently using? I guess Amazon figures there's enough money in a government contract to be worth it. It's definitely odd for 'cloud' -- ordinarily, the whole reason cloud resources can "scale up or down to meet the need" but still make business sense for the host, is that the resources are aggregated across customers. right? That's sort of what made 'the cloud' possible, resources that could be put on the internet and aggregated across the entire customer base. I wonder how that's going to end up working out; perhaps there's enough IC business that it ends up aggregating out over individual government customers anyway. (Or will be eventually; $600 million over ten years isn't actually that big, is it?) Still, with a private cloud necessarily having a smaller use base than the actual 'cloud', it seems kind of predictable that either Amazon will end up with a smaller profit margin (or risk a negative profit margin); or the government will be paying higher rates than the actual cloud; or the government will sometimes find itself maxed out because Amazon was conservative in predicting demand to save money. Or do I have it all wrong, and these servers will be in Amazon's ordinary data centers, the same place as the rest of AWS, but on some kind of VPN or something? The article doesn't really give us the details (unsurprisingly).