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Comment by oliverx0 | Hacker News Reader

Seems a bit too tailored though - "To even make a bid, a provider must maintain a distance of at least 150 miles between its data centers, a prerequisite that only Amazon can currently meet. JEDI also asks for “32 GB of RAM”—the precise specification of Amazon’s services. (Microsoft, by contrast, offers only 28 GB, and Google provides 30 GB.) In places, JEDI echoes Amazon’s own language: It calls for a “ruggedized” storage system, the same word Amazon uses to tout its Snowball Edge product."

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Way out of date, too. I suspect the reporting should have been fact checked, or updated.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing

I guarantee that Google has more than 150 miles between data centers ;)

It sounds like the military wants what Amazon can provide, but is allowing other competitors to step up and give it a better deal. There are obvious reasons why a military customer would want distance between data centers and ruggedized storage, that's surely one of the reasons why Amazon has implemented them.

I think the major concern perhaps isn't the particulars of the spec, or even that maybe only Amazon can fully meet some of them, but that they are so clearly based on Amazon's exact capabilities that it raises the question of whether another provider will even get a fair hearing.

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?

When I was in college, I was a systems administrator for a lab as a part-time student job. After I graduated, they wanted to hire me full-time. But it was a state university, so they had to open up the job to everyone, and they had to have a specific window for applications. So... my boss wrote the job description exactly around my resume. Lo-and-behold, I got the job.

Guys, please, try to be reasonable here.

150 miles is not an insert for Amazon. I'm not a general, but even I can see that 150 miles is military sense.

150 specifically just happens to be the military requirement? Not 100 or 200, but 150, which just happens to be the distance that Amazon offers?

? it is a minimum of 150 miles. And no, this is not the distance that Amazon offers, Google and Azure also can match this offer.

I wouldn't be surprised if a bunch of the requirements used Amazon's numbers and marketing material as, shall we say, inspiration.

There is a 50-miles requirement for financial companies that came into effect after the 9/11. So I think 150 miles isn't all that unreasonable for military.

It’s probably 150 miles within an availability zone.

Datacenters in the same AZ are much closer than 150 miles, right?

No idea Jeff. :)

I do know the Iowa is >150 miles from Ashburn, VA, so Google Cloud and Azure should have been able to meet that requirement.

Google provides up to 3844 GB of Ram, https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2018/05/Introducing-ult...

While google also provides custom VM sizes, Does this mean Jedi includes hard instance type requirements that were basically copies of AWS EC2 types?

I'm going to speculate (Occam's razor) that the majority of their server portfolio are 32GB servers in those 400 datacenters, and so this is what they need, and so they documented it as a requirement. For data center migrations, this is fairly typical.

Google was and likely still is in the running for JEDI, because Eric Schmidt is an advisor for the DoD and nudges them towards Google, and JEDI was the whole point of signing the relatively small Maven contract. Google offers pretrained AI models and hands-on consulting to put AI on drones, and in exchange the DoD gives them a piece of JEDI. But Maven turned into a huge controversy which doesn't make Google leadership look good in the eyes of the DoD, and they probably wanted to go all-in with the market leader anyway (seeing as they're very conservative), so now maybe Amazon will just win the whole thing.

"JEDI also asks for “32 GB of RAM”—the precise specification of Amazon’s services. (Microsoft, by contrast, offers only 28 GB, and Google provides 30 GB.)"

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.

Well they probably have an upper tier. If it costs the same it's to be seen.

But yeah, if Google or Microsoft engineers can't create a custom instance with 32GB of memory then they shouldn't get the bid

While the Azure D series and G series are 14/28/56/112/140, the F series is available with base 2 increments.

Those seem like standard specs to me. 32 GB is a standard number for RAM. Also, I'd be shocked if other major cloud providers have all their data centers within 150 miles of each other - that would eliminate geographic redundancies.

That is standard procedure for drafting request for bids pretty much. Some lobbyist makes the draft to suit their own company.

This took about 30 seconds to fact check. Google offers an n1-standard-32 with 32GB RAM, and Azure offers A4MS and B4MS with 32GB of RAM. I can't even find any instances from either provider for 28 or 30 GB.

https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#predefined_machine_... https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/virtual-ma...

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