It’s Amazon’s Swamp Now
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https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing
I guarantee that Google has more than 150 miles between data centers ;)
As an analogy, imagine that there's a new senior job opening in your organisation, and both you and a colleague are considering applying. You're both pretty skilled, with resumes that are quite similar, albeit not identical. You hear through the grapevine that you co-worker plays golf with a couple of the people who'll be on the interview panel, but you trust them to be impartial.
Then the official job description gets published, and it's identical to your colleague's resume. It's as if somebody has gone through it line by line and translated that into the job's desirables. In some cases, the requirements are verbatim copies of some experience your colleague mentions.
Now, you're convinced that you could still do the job. And perhaps if you really knock it out of the park during the interview, and make a deliberately lowballed salary demand, you've got a chance. But, at this point, would you believe that the process is impartial? Or would you conclude that, at the very least, it is so stacked heavily in favour of your colleague that your chances of swaying the interviewers over to your side are slim, and perhaps nonexistent?
150 miles is not an insert for Amazon. I'm not a general, but even I can see that 150 miles is military sense.
I do know the Iowa is >150 miles from Ashburn, VA, so Google Cloud and Azure should have been able to meet that requirement.
While google also provides custom VM sizes, Does this mean Jedi includes hard instance type requirements that were basically copies of AWS EC2 types?
What? Microsoft only provides 28 GB of RAM, and Google only 30 GB? I'm pretty sure neither Azure nor GCP even launched with limits that strict.
But yeah, if Google or Microsoft engineers can't create a custom instance with 32GB of memory then they shouldn't get the bid
https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#predefined_machine_... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...
I skimmed through some of this and I don't see anything obviously rigged for AWS. There are mentions of 32GB VMs, but it doesn't say they have to be exactly 32GB. I found the 150-mile requirement but it also doesn't look AWS-specific. The description of the ruggedized "tactical edge" device doesn't sound identical to the existing Snowball Edge.
Just because you learned AWS and it's been good for your resume doesn't mean that they aren't being underhanded in D.C.
If you are going to be a fan boy about it, then you should be excited that they seem to be outmaneuvering established players in the federal sector. That's what's happening.
This isn't "they built a better mousetrap", this is "they hired all the people that are ever asked about mousetraps, and they changed the language that you have to use to ask for a mousetrap, and they took over one of the better outlets that runs stories about fraud in the mousetrap business. Oh and their commodity mousetrap business is one of three equally good ones."
I know that you think AWS is WAY better and that it makes a difference. It doesn't. Azure and GCP are just as good for most of the things that people are building these days. Sure there are differences, but it's a commodity market.
In my mind, the likelihood is that people would complain no matter who got this contract. If it went to Microsoft, the article would be about all the high ranking contacts between Microsoft and the Pentagon. As a pragmatic matter, any organization with the expertise and scale to realistically execute this contract will have deep connections with the Pentagon. At several levels.
The DoD intends to use multiple cloud providers overall, across multiple projects —- but not within this single contract.
The CIA already has a $600M contract with AWS.
a) prevents you from using any of the custom features that many each service great (for instance lambda, aurora, dynamodb or in the case of google cloud, some of their ML tech). Might as well use on-prem if you’re not going to using AWS/Azure/GSuite feature on top of IaaS b) requires you to set up multiple alarms, logs, metrics, on different providers which can themselves be the source of bugs c) doesn’t provide you much more availability/redundancy them simply using multiple regions d)while this may give you long term negotiating power, you will likely just save more money with long term exclusive contracts.
The DOD will also likely never be 100% migrated to AWS and there will probably be more contracts
Uh, This would be true, if one expected prices (and technology) to remain stable, but since that isn't the case, maintaining re-negotiating power is quite a bit more advantageous than you imply.
All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to provide accurate capacity forecasts and make long term commitments.
And the while the “technology gets cheaper” argument is true, I believe it is generally understood that while AWS/Azure/Google can use this trend at the scale they operate at (and then pass the savings to the customers), most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
Maintaining the ability to move between providers is not at all the same as maintaining your systems on all three simultaneously.
> All of these services provide pretty steep discounts (as a percentage of original costs) for customers who are able to [...] make long term commitments.
Sure. But the question is, at the end of that commitment, are you locked in to that provider by the cost of having to redevelop for a different provider (which gives your existing provider an unearned pricing advantage), or can you switch providers because you had the foresight to make sure your deployments were portable?
> most cloud customers would spend more money hiring additional engineers to maintain more complicated infrastructure then they would save trying to take advantage of this trend.
Sure, because most cloud customers are small and are drawn by the prospect of not maintaining infrastructure at all (in other words, they're actually SaaS customers by preference), and the non-portability of G-Suite's integration with GCP as compared with Office 365's integration with Azure is relatively immarterial compared to the non-portability between G-Suite and Office 365.
But (right now, at least) at the scale where you are for example selecting a cloud orchestration solution, going for the one that provides better portability between different providers with an abstraction layer doesn't really impose additional costs (because you'll need to develop internal expertise in whatever solution you choose).
I don't get this one.
Azure's government data centers are in Virginia, Iowa, Arizona, and Texas. Their DoD data centers are Virginia and Iowa. I don't know where they are in those specific states, but the only pair that could be less than 150 miles apart are Texas and Arizona, and that is only if the Arizona one is within a few miles of the SE corner of Arizona and the Texas one is up in the NW sort-of corner of Texas.
On the other, of course the winner has capabilities that better suit the specs - that's the goal of competitive bidding and we should hope that it's true of all winning bidders. So the fact that the winner's capabilities match the specs well doesn't tell us anything; if they didn't match well, it would be signal of corruption in the selection process.
This is Amazon trying to engineer a permanent piece of the public largess for themselves. That's all. They aren't better at this than anyone else. For that matter, the same could be said for all the other top tech companies. I'm just tired of AWS fans saying that it's strictly merit based. That's not how anything works in big business. It's naïve and childish.
tl;dr It is not a scandal that the leading cloud provider is in the pole position for a large cloud contract.
If you do a search with, for example, a minimum provider staff security clearance of DV (which is pretty high, would apply to many matters of national security), all the major cloud providers disappear from the results, and you get smaller companies based in the UK, who use UK datacenters, and who are seemingly adding their own layers of encryption on top.
1. https://www.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/buyers/direct-...
Again, this is all publicly accessible because 99% of the use is not the intelligence services or military, it's instead random government departments, local government offices, hospitals, doctors surgeries, etc. This is designed to replace most computing purchasing in the UK public sector.
I’m mad about this because this affects individual contributors, on up to the country at large. Currently money is wasted and systems are built in ridiculous ways. Imagine each sub program in a branch of service rolling it’s own IAM. That’s just a glimpse at what’s going on. The undifferentiated heavy lifting is unfathomable.
Before you respond with virtue signaling about war know that most DoD software is for logistics. Done better it boils down to not wasting tax payer money.
It is not "virtue signaling" to be actually anti-war. Most virtue signaling on this topic revolves around the motte-and-bailey of "support the troops". Furthermore, if one is anti-war, then making the military less expensive isn't actually a good thing.
(or you could have just left this last bit out and stayed less political)
The reality is probably that Amazon is using some shady tactics to try and close this deal, but so are all the other bidders (it's not like Microsoft, who is probably the second-most likely to win JEDI, doesn't have an extensive set of Pentagon connections too). This is just how the game is played and you've gotta roll with it. Eventually this will be awarded one way or the other and we'll all move on.
Whats really interesting though, is that, a huge swath of talent will be ineligeble to work on this as GovCloud/FedRamp requirements for US Citizen employees, physically located in the US to be able to access and work on any of these systems really does impose some limits on the pool.
And while, regardless of how you look at this, it is dysopian from the Corporate-yberPunk-Future perspective (small book seller is now the richest man in the world, and is responsible for the company which monolithically provides the largest government military its computing infra) - There arent really any other alternatives.
I'd say that the opportunity sitting right in front of the talent pool who couldnt be legally able to work on GovCloud implementations would be to ramp up their training and setting up consulting groups who can.
That doesn't stop some DoD contractors from still subcontracting foreign nationals. Crazy what goes on.
Question: How do you vet a non-citizen for work on a DoD system? Let me give you a tiny example. Let's say you have a system for keeping track of jet parts. Super important stuff. What's to say a foreign agent couldn't make a subtle "mistake" that allows for misuse or misallocation of parts by not properly storing their flight history? Planes fail and fall out of the sky. This could totally happen (not saying it has although, again, the stories I hear JFC) and a competing state would be foolish not to try it.
Yeah, there is no way that this contract is not the largest target possible...
I am honestly fascinated and really interested in the cyber-warfare that has, is and will be going on.
Just thinking about Stuxnet/Duqu is pretty amazing - the things that are going on that we don't currently know about and the things that will happen are very interesting.
What I would like to determine, as an emergent tell of the electronic warfare between states is the true disposition between "enemies" -- i.e. we know that Iran and Israel really are enemies and assassinating targets of opportunity (stuxnet ++ engineers previously killed), but it should be telling when publicly on state denounces another (e.g. US denounces NK), but then doesnt take any back-channel actions against the state - or the reverse...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-joins-...
[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/07/the-d...
If you "want to do something BIG", that "BIG" thing is, by definition, going to have an impact. That is to say, it will exert some form of power. And you're probably going to have to do that with other people. Probably in the form of a corporation.
Why can't they build this themselves? If the DoD is such a large customer, has such precise needs and requirements, they should build their own datacenters with their own staff and manage it in-house.
> (snip) And you're probably going to have to do that with other people. Probably in the form of a corporation.
The government manages a nuclear arsenal and a space flight program. There's no valid reason they couldn't build and run their own server farm without giving it all away to Amazon/Microsoft/Google/Oracle. There's no good reason everything in the entire nation has to be privatized like this.
But maybe that would cost 2-3-4 times as much as buying it?
Why shouldn't they instead go with the best in the world?
Presumably, the whole reason why they are doing this, is because they DID build it themselves a decade or so ago, and it didn't result in the best outcome.
Government IT has quite a terrible reputation these days. The government should instead be pushing to have the best in the world.
Do they not read Trump's Twitter? He's complained about Amazon and Bezos a ton.
TLDR: amazon knows people at dod, they decide to do business together, who cares?
Given that Oracle only exists as a company due to the fact that they built one of the first/earliest RDMSs for the CIA makes me not shed many tears for them...
Also, what is Palantir up to these days?