Why can't they just host their own servers/compute/etc?
I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.
I never understand why the us government wants to contract these things.
Governments outsource because the best people in various industries aren't working for the government (for lots of different reasons).
Government IT expertise is not high-quality and will never match what AWS has. It's about value, not cost. It's better to have reliable and scalable infrastructure even if AWS is vastly more expensive.
Ideally, they’d contribute to OpenStack through such an initiative, ensuring an open source alternative to commercial closed cloud providers.
I don’t want my tax dollars going towards Bezo’s attempts at a retail and cloud computing monopoly, but that’s just me. Maybe there’s an opportunity here for Trump considering his disdain for Bezos and the USDS being part of the Executive Office of the President.
Nah.
I ran a couple data centers on either coast each burning about half a megawatt, which isn't that much in the grand scheme of thing. My employer at the time offered a SaaS product to Fortune 100 companies. The product required a realtime kernel and QOS in the network, neither of which is supported in AWS.
I did a fair bit of math comparing costs. Typically, you could pay off the CapEx with 6 months of usage in AWS.
IIRC we had around $8m in salaries for the ops org. I'm not sure we would've needed a great deal fewer people having all that infra in AWS.
The real problem comes from trying to find a team of people willing to engineer your service for failure. That kind of attitude just doesn't exist in the world of IT, so anyone would be hard pressed to put a team together.
Good luck finding a network engineering team that knows BGP well enough for such a thing. Good luck finding a team of engineers that know Openstack well enough to keep it running. Good luck finding folks to run Ceph. Good luck getting all that right.
If you could, though, there are certainly savings to be had.
How many data centers do you think Oracle operates in the US, presently?
Or two departments have essentially the same requirements, but they compete for budget and each have to justify their staffing by duplicating effort.
(These pathologies aren't unique to government. You can also find them in large private companies.)
I think that falls under the `other reasons`
Building data centers is expensive and on-demand compute is nice
On demand compute is nice for startups, but overly expensive for mature organizations.
You cannot afford to own a refinery. Delta Airlines can and does, as a hedge against fuel costs (which turned out to be a very profitable decision for them). That is the point.