Hacker News Reader

Comment by z3t4 | Hacker News Reader

What do the military need 10 billion US dollars in cloud computing for ? Are they going to fork Bitcoin? DDOS attack? If they are for example going to archive video footage, it's probably much cheaper to print it to film.

View on HN

Real-time surveillance of the world. Who said what when where to whom. Was that a threat. What were the consequences. Feeds for video, sound, https streams from billions of Internet devices. ML to extract salient features, at multiple levels of resolution. $10B is a drop in the bucket. This is heading into trillions territory. I wouldn't be surprised that in 10 years half the Pentagon budget will be spent on the cloud.

We can glimpse a world-wide stack-ranking system: "Echelon [0], who are the 1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position and what will be their whereabouts today?". "Matrix [1], please dispose of these individuals at these locations". Let's pray there will still be some humans between step 0 and step 1. Worse, by the logic of MAD, it is possible we are going to end up with 2 such systems, one for USA and one for China, caught in a new cold war. Think distributed Vietnam.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix

distributed Vietnam lmao.

I think most of your description is coming form a high-ranking general's wet dream though. When it comes to actual engineering, it would be between the simple solution that works - or complex solution that doesn't work.

Having worked in a predictive analytics role before, I can guarantee that '1000 individuals most threatening to our strategic position' would consist of 500 innocent villagers, 30 kids playing around and 1 hospital.

And a wedding party.

The intelligence community (IC) [1] is not part of the JEDI contract [2]. While many IC components are part of DoD, the IC spans a wider swath of government (e.g. parts are distributed across DOJ, DOE, Homeland Security, State, etc). In addition to different mission sets, they are also governed under a different set of laws. Therefore, DoD (like DOJ, DOE, Homeland, etc) systems connect to IC systems to share information, but there are distinct infrastructures whereby neither has full visibility into the other.

[1]: https://www.intelligence.gov/ [2]: https://www.fedscoop.com/cia-confirms-multi-cloud-procuremen...

Quite frankly there are also a lot more boring answers as well, like they need email, they need a cloud office suite, they need servers to run their interanets, more than half a dozen stupid servers and applications that don't quite work right but have to be kept around because it is someone's pet project or X dollars was blown on it, etc. Think of the biggest organization you've worked in think of all the bureaucracy involved and all the stupid decisions and politics and now multiply that by having the CEO change every 4-8 years, people in the millions and just to make things even more fun the executives that make all the decisions are congress.

If anything I don't know if $10 billion is going to be enough for the level of crazy that can go on in the government.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20427578

P2V a lot of legacy on-premises data centers and reap savings, much as many enterprises have been doing for a while.

Take Mores law for example. Going from 10 transistors to 20 transistors is a small step. We are now going from 1 billion to 2 billion. That is a huge step. So you can now use one server to run many virtual servers. You could probably run the entire enterprise on a NUC.

They spend about a billion a year just on email. Another billion per year of cloud stuff is nothing

With 2 M email accounts that number should be at least one order of magnitude lower. Computers are great at solving problems at scale. The marginal cost of hosting another email account when you already have hundreds is close to zero.

Well isn’t that the magic of software? The costs to run something flatten out as you increase usage, whereas the licensing costs increase linearly.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com