Amazon asks court to halt Microsoft's work on Pentagon 'war cloud'
thehill.com
thehill.com
HP and Oracle have been reaping the benefits of this for at least two decades now. We put databases on Oracle that should be handled by Postgres or MariaDB since DoD prefers Oracle. We would buy useless HP software because we were a HP shop. I fought to get a non HP solid state array for our data, it was an epic battle (in the end I won, on the extreme we had 6 to 7 hour processes cut down to under an hour, the HP equivalent could not replicate that at the time).
So i can see DoD moving to Azure and then get the vendor lock in and in 10 years if they want to move the cost will be so extreme it will either cause taxpayers a ton of money or not be realistic.
As impossible as it sounds, and somewhat impractical, i would rather see a vendor agnostic approach and DoD spread across multiple gov clouds. i guess years has gotten me jaded with government spending (wait, what, how did we buy 2 extra $50k Cisco chassis and then keep them in storage for 3 years....).
(This isn't my area expertise, so I'm open to the idea of being super wrong)
So in the cloud just migrates the a lot of the security to another team. I do not know for a fact, but I am pretty sure the DoD cannot just show up at the AWS or Azure facilities and start auditing them (maybe they can and it is in a contract, someone else might know).
If we ordered a server it would show up in 6 to 12 months and sometimes would be sent to the wrong place. The people in charge of ordering would replace SSDs with spinning disk and we wouldn't know about the change until the wrong parts arrive months later. Fun times.
Some of these companies need to replace 40% of their workforce in the next decade. Who would a new grad choose?
Sure, but the procurement process is incredibly difficult to crack into for small companies. There is tremendous amounts of red tape designed to keep other players out.
> Some of these companies need to replace 40% of their workforce in the next decade. Who would a new grad choose?
Most will go to where the money is...unless you go FAANG, it's harder to find the kind of high salaries that defense contractors can throw around in the private sector.
There is a reason the DC suburbs of Northern VA and Southern MD have some of the richest counties in the US...
Call it what it is - bureaucracy, and corruption.
I mean, if you’ve already budgeted the CapEx for some additional Oracle licenses, the OpEx efficiencies of having unified tooling and a unified ops doctrine are no joke.
I haven’t worked with an Oracle DBMS, but I think this is analogous: I’d sure hate to have to manage a cloud infrastructure where parts were on AWS, parts on GCP, and parts on Azure. Sure, there are generic tools that treat all three the same, or over-layers like K8s that don’t care about substrate—but what if the projects on each platform were taking advantage of that platform’s specialties? What if I was using SNS on AWS, or BigQuery on GCP?
To bring that back through the analogy, what if our Oracle projects were tuned using Oracle-specific query-planner hints, while our Postgres projects did their ETL using PG-specific Foreign Data Wrapper connectors?
In both cases, the only real solution is hiring and retaining O(N) specialized ops headcount, one team for each stack. And that cost gets a lot higher than just paying for another darn Oracle license.
Are they doing a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking? Are they primarily just doing one of these things?
Who knows?
There's a lot of cases where having multiple clouds could be fine -- maybe even a big benefit. There's also a lot of cases where it could be a major headache.
We all saw T3, we know it is skynet
I know a little about it from a previous employer.
Even the narrow slice I saw was all of "a lot of compute, a lot of ingestion, a lot of output, and a ton of networking", and more.
I think that the internal inefficiencies in the DOD datacenters are so enormous that any kind move to something more 'standardized', no matter what company it is, even with all of the artificial overhead, etc, will likely be a big win.
Military budgets... Spend it or lose it.
It's better you find spare cisco chassis, than hundreds of zip disks or obsolete laptops >.>
They did this with a few database servers as well, they were supposed to order 8 core processors, but they ordered 10 core instead (it was a typo), they had 4 processors per machine it was a $40k extra mess not including the extra Oracle licenses needed to buy since Oracle licenses by cores (8 extra cores per machine and 3 machines).
But i do understand the spend it or lose it, which is another reason no one tries to be efficient.
There were some improprieties found as it relates to the conduct of Amazon's agents and in the RFP process, but it got the greenlight overall. This might be the problem with Amazon litigating the changes to the RFP process. Oracle already litigated the previous version of the RFP. It looks like the process changed in part to head off the perception that it was rigged in favor of Amazon. Now, Amazon alleges that this re-rigging made it rigged out of its favor.
So, it went:
Oracle: "This is rigged for Amazon! These requirements can only be met by Amazon! Also it's unfair that it can only be won by a single entity!"
Judge: "The Pentagon didn't want to have multiple clouds because it would defeat the reason for the project. We didn't find that the RFP was corrupt to the point of breaking the law, but it was definitely sort of corrupt, particularly in the case of the dude who was on the committee creating the RFP while simultaneously selling a startup to Amazon while simultaneously telling the Pentagon that he wasn't breaking the law and telling Amazon he was not breaking the law, but he was totally breaking the law."
This obviously put the Pentagon between the rock of leaving the RFP as-is and being sued again for corruption and the hard place of changing the RFP and being accused of improper political influence. If Trump had avoided taking a public stance on the issue it would have been much better for the Pentagon's situation, as this now creates a situation in which no matter what the Pentagon decided they could be credibly accused of corruption.
The non-partisan GAO seems to disagree: https://apnews.com/9127109f325778490fd40c5f98be1817
Absolutely and immediately, once convicted, but that hasn't happened. And to emphasize my point about party lines - how much do you want to bet it won't happen?
But let's be clear that my first comment was tongue-in-cheek. I'm not saying the president ACTUALLY has more power depending on the party. I'm saying that things people were fine with under Obama are suddenly a problem under Trump. And I will expect the same thing next time there's a Democrat in office - suddenly Republicans will flip-flop on the way the office is supposed to operate.
edit: Maybe a more appropriate question is, among people who label themselves as "Democrat" and "Republican", who thinks that Trump should lose power after his impeachment, who also thinks that Clinton should have lost power after his impeachment?
Intent and outcomes matter if the question is "Should this person lose power?"
The offenses and fact patterns in question are quite different in these two cases.
But on the other topic (apples to oranges comparison): it's possible for both votes to be party-line regardless of the fact pattern if one party is corrupt and just always votes to maximize party power independent of fact patterns, and the fact pattern would induce a more objective juror to vote one way in one case and the other way in the other case.
(The difference would be one would anticipate were a Democrat to do what Trump did, they'd be roundly impeached and convicted).
"1 of 2 parties is just corrupt" lol ok
> There's enough evidence for Amazon to take legal action.
The "enough" here is zero. They may have more, but you argued for at least zero.
No, it isn't. Legally it might be zero, but multi-billion dollar companies don't enter legal processes that last years and cost them millions just for the sake of it. This isn't the same as "you'll hear from my lawyer".
How isn't it? You keep speaking authoritatively on this; where is your evidence? And any derivation of "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win" isn't evidence.
> "Amazon is a big company and they don't enter lawsuits they won't win"
this simply isn't what I said.
Second - my evidence? We're not in court and I'm not trying to prove anything to you. I just explained my thought process - if you disagree or if you think there's a flaw in my reasoning, you can point it out. Or you can move on and ignore what I've written.
I tend to have discussions with people online to understand their point of view. Will you indulge me and share why you think there's merit to the case or is this thread just another pair of soapboxes where we each squawk from our megaphones and leave without mutual understanding?
Let's establish as true a pretty important prior:
1. Anyone who has rightfully-obtained access or knowledge of any such evidence is most likely obligated (legally or otherwise) to keep it secret.
Given #1, asking for evidence isn't the most salient question. Since it can really only be speculation, the most interesting questions probably start with "Given what we know, what is most likely?"
In the United States and other common-law legal systems (I don't know about other codes at all) there is the concept of "summary judgement", which would absolutely be invoked if Amazon presented no "no genuine dispute as to any material fact and the movant is entitled to judgment as a matter of law" [1]. A summary judgement can be sought with full evidentiary presentation. Amazon's evidence may well be weak, but if they presented "zero evidence" the case wouldn't go to trial at all. It's perfectly reasonable to expect and assume a certain basic level of competence from an established megacorp's legal team. They will have filed a cause of action to which they could at least potentially be entitled relief and assertions of material facts that a jury could at least potentially be convinced by.
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1: "Rule 56 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure", https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_56
Now Amazon has a strong financial incentive to go to court in this case as winning can lead to potentially securing a 10b$ contract. Whereas losing costs maybe some millions?
Both Bezos and Trump are very pragmatic business men. I think this is all just about money.
But Trump gonna Trump.
1) Price services at current rates today.
2) Delay usage for 4 years until everything costs half as much.
3) Profit $$$
Somehow people forget Japan started the war in the Pacific and murdered tens of millions of Chinese, Koreans, and other Asian civilians in the process.
I would not be surprised if something similar happened here, although the payout would likely be far higher and I'm in no way comparing Methods Consulting to Microsoft.
So instead the government outsources technical projects to private contractors... which means ultimately the government is paying those big salaries, and the profit margin on top of them.
One of many many "penny wise / pound foolish" problems with the way we do government services.
Also it's for NSA's questionably legal spying on US citizens vs the more standard legality of DoD's work.
And this comes from an unabashed hard left big government voter.
The federal government, in the name of cutting waste and fighting corruption, largely is forced to do the opposite in the IT space (with a few rare exceptions).
[1] Not implying Amazon is alone on this; all the big cloud operators do.
I think Amazon should have just acknowledged it, congratulate Microsoft and move on - plenty of other growth ahead in cloud computing. That's what Satya Nadella would have done.
Each of the cloud providers have various things they do better than others depending on what you’re trying to do.
If you are not a Microsoft shop (i.e. >50% of your stuff runs on Linux), I would almost say avoid Azure because of how focused it is on their stack. I know you can run arbitrary Linux on Azure and generally get everything done, but AWS (and all other non-Microsoft cloud vendors) always seemed more friendly/cheaper for non-Windows/Office concerns.
So, it's not just about the cloud platforms and their respective costs per feature consumption unit. It's also about your business and the ecosystem required to support and operate within these cloud platforms.
The tooling that matters to me (az cli, terraform, vscode, kubectl et all) runs absolutely fine on Azure. I use Linux to create and manage Linux and open source infra on azure every day.
The majority of complaints I hear about azure tend to revolve around their AzureRM templating, which is admittedly terrible, but irrelevant since terraform exists (and cloudformation is not much better imo).
Also a lot of people dont/didn't like their portal. I don't frequently use the portal, and besides have you seen the aws portal? It's woeful.
One benefit of azure is they name their products logically, like "azure virtual machine" instead of "magic beanstalk" or w/e
An example of such service is their Azure AD B2C service, which is their competitor to AWS cognito. We have been using it and as a baseline login service, and it works fine. However, the service doesn't see much upgrades. Their "user flow" templates, which control the logon process, have been in preview for years.
Yes, Identity Server 4 exists but it would be nice to have decent competitors to Spot Fleets, ECS, Cognito, etc.
- bid for contracts that enables government to make some real progress
- lose
- sue because you lost, claim winner can’t start until your suit is over
- introduce 1-2 year delay of waiting while your complaint is processed
and people wonder why china gets things done in a quarter of the time
So sure, you can get a lot done in those cases, but it might not be the right things to do, and there's zero process for remediation except to hope that another party leader takes over and changes it for you.
So when anyone says China is totalitarian this is what is meant and why the US is ideologically opposed to China and Chinese rule.
E.g. it took a whole administration (~5 years) to get through with a door-to-door recycling system because of lawsuits and appeals.
But here's the thing: in government it's very important that contracts are awarded on objective merit, because otherwise there's shockingly large opportunity for corruption and favoritism. Billions and billions of dollars of opportunity.
And also in this case, Trump's deep antipathy towards Bezos is well-documented, as well as his willingness to use government means for personal ends. Trump instructing the Pentagon to drop the objectively best bid seems to fit his established pattern of behavior.
So in this case, Amazon's suit seems to be an entirely reasonable response. If what Amazon alleges is true and they win, it will be a victory for good government and correct use of taxpayer dollars. Presidents aren't kings -- it's vitally important for democracy that objective procedures are followed, and that personal grudges aren't allowed to influence multi-billion dollar deals.
I'll admit it's the reality in countries with less developed governments, sure. But it's a reality we ought to fight against for the benefit of all, not to blindly and meekly accept. And historically, court cases are one of the primary tools in waging this fight.
No they're elected, which rather complicates the point you're trying to make here. In a representative democracy, the voters speak through their representatives. That is your democracy. Courts would be undemocratic when they intervene based on a "higher" authority (like constitutional rules no one voted for). Not saying it is a bad thing, voters can be dumb and a good code of rules would be better to the degree it is upheld.
With quotes from this thread like "in the meantime the work doesn't get done," and "bid for contracts that [enable] government to make some real progress," you'd never guess this stuff is going to be used to and to enable murder.
So many people were focusing on how Microsoft Ɛ> Linux or Open Source or whatever (so much so that even rms went to Microsoft and complimented them) yet completely ignore the harm they're still trying to cause.
Do we not need a military?
Nothing is perfect, but we are trapped on a planet with a bunch of violent, highly intelligent apes. Certainly the military does things I disagree with, and things could always be improved, but generally what is the alternative?
If you can stage a coup or rile up and train a militia to fight your proxy war, there is no need for an outdated notion of "imperialism".
The US has the most powerful military the world has ever seen, and that power is not simply being tossed into the dumpster.
That said I do agree we spend too much on our military. We should always spend more than any other nation to ensure dominance, but I'd imagine cutting the budget down would force efficiency and actually improve the military at this point.
However it seemed the person above was saying that militaries in general are bad or murderous which is very different from saying the budget just needs to be reduced.
Cuba's shiny new banking system, Japan's Navy(?), and Afghanistan's poppy fields disagree.
The United States military has lost its privilege to play any form of moralism or rational justification after their actions over the past 30-50 years. It's no longer defense in most cases, it's assault. Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, the second Iraq, invading Afghanistan for funsies, there's no point to most of it.
We've only had one success in decades, and it still wasn't even related to defense!
There's a difference between defense and imperialistic invasions, and the United States military hasn't defended much of anything at home in quite a while.
Obviously, the U.S. Military does slightly more than assault. Proportionally not much more, but a bit more. Like football.
Force projection - do as we say or else.
This is only true, if you take it as axiomatic that armed forces have one job, which is killing and that all killing in armed conflict is simple murder. That's not a position I take.
Personally, I do think our foreign deployments and presence should absolutely be dramatically reduced. I also think most federal spending is bureaucratic fluff. That said, I have less problem when there are efforts to stabilize or reduce spending via technology. And I find that people who try to take an ethical stance over companies offering any kind of service to the government is short sighted at best, and dangerous or destructive at worst.
In the end, this will happen, and I'd rather it go to a company that is focused on the problem (technical infrastructure for computing resources) over the government trying to build a bureaucratic mess that costs a significant amount more.
Not that everything should be outsourced. For example, I think privatized prisons are far, far, far worse for society than providing a cloud network for the federal govt.
In either case, offering cloud services to the Government isn't really an authoritarian position.
I'm not a proponent of our foreign engagements at all... however, this isn't the place where such a line should be drawn. I find that anywhere the government can more effectively reduce costs and/or improve it infrastructure should generally be preferred.
Frankly, I'd love to see most of our foreign deployments dramatically scaled back. I just don't think the mentality that nobody should provide any kind of technical services to the government would only make things worse, not better overall, and that specific criticisms shouldn't be part of decisions of infrastructure use.
https://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/nation-world/national/artic...
And then there’s tens of millions of artillery shells, if you’re counting all ordnance.
Vietnam war had a huge amount of bombing too, with cluster bombs and the like.
I’d be a bit surprised if Obama made the top 5, but maybe.
DoD uses a lot of linux and other open source software. Should we stop working on that too since, according to you, it's "enabling murder"?
Development labs end up using Linux and other open source software all over the place, but it gets a bit more iffy when you're going into production.
We had to verify everything was approved through DADSM (potentially navy specific), but other than that as long as we had a legal license to run we were good.
This is what forced me into using centos for our deployed infrastructure, and mIRC as our chat client of choice.
The US military has ensured peace and prosperity for billions around the world for decades given its formidable global presence.
Imagine the chaos and crime that would descends on a community without police or law enforcement. The world operates the exact same way. There will always be a most powerful country enforcing stability and global compliance, and I would much rather it be the US than Russia or China.
I've lived there but if you don't believe me, ask a few Vietnamese yourself, they're not shy about it.
Also the US did not bring "the piece and prosperity" to Vietnam unless you mean withdrawing from that murderous war that they started in a first place. What brought a relative prosperity was that their communist government did soften their stance towards market based economy. And feeling some guilt US probably contributed few pesos.
Combine that with a persistent stigma against working in defense and we have a recipe of losing our technology edge within the this century if not sooner. What will our rivals decide to do once that happens?
Nothing, you have a capacity to turn Earth into a glass fields. Also the work to improve said capacity seems to have started.
On one hand, we need to be thoughtful and mindful of the ethical implications of all that we do. On the other hand, every action always has a context inside a larger system and has unintended consequences and being an ethical purist can sometimes be more harmful. Most people who are older fall somewhere between striving to do the right thing but also recognizing they cannot control all the consequences and even if they could, they cannot predict what greater harm or good may result.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_double_effect
I've been living under a rock, apparently.
Is there some requirement that when a right-wing celebrity gets elected President, they have to use Star Wars codenames?
There's the deceptive mantra repeated mindlessly over and over, yet again. And there is nothing hard either. It is just complex. So everyone mindlessly pays too much because some marketing has successfully sold them that this is "too hard".