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Comment by whoisthisfor | Hacker News Reader

I'd be fine with either AWS or Azure getting the contact. It makes sense to pick one provider, as their workloads are ... unique.

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I've been torn on this contract from a professional experience POV. In the IC we got AWS after they beat out IBM and the IBM protest. I'm an AWS fan so I was excited and it worked well for me when I was a contractor (I'm no longer in the space).

But having the DOD on AWS along with the IC concerns me from a lack of diversity standpoint. I've always said that Microsoft and Google should have teamed up a bit to make a competitive run. But I don't think anyone was ever interested in sharing the contract to begin with.

Azure has a large presence in the government and they have a fairly robust offering that multiple agencies use. So its not as big a mono culture as you might think. I know this one contract makes lots of noise because its the DoD and people think the military is this huge organism, but the Department of Veterans Affairs was on tract to spend 1B on cloud per year and they use Azure ( as well as AWS )

It blows my mind a department dedicated to Veterans Affairs can spend 1 billion on cloud computing in a year, do you have a source or any more information about what they’re spending that on?

They're probably the largest hospital provider in the country. Looking at their wiki it says there's 152 hospitals and 1400 outpatient facilities. Plus all the other VA responsibilities they fulfill.

It's a big organization and they have a lot of 'customers'

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