Microsoft’s $10bn Jedi cloud contract “sets dangerous precedent”, says AWS | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft’s $10bn Jedi cloud contract “sets dangerous precedent”, says AWS

tech.newstatesman.com

30 pointswlscr50 comments

Wondering if anyone in these comments actually read the post.

They are making a legitimate point about an unfair public procurement process that the president interfered in for personal reasons.

> There is a recurring pattern to the way President Trump behaves when he’s called out for doing something egregious: first he denies doing it, then he looks for ways to push it off to the side, to distract attention from it and delay efforts to investigate it (so people get bored and forget about it). And then he ends up doubling down on the egregious act anyway. On JEDI, President Trump reportedly ordered former Secretary Mattis to “screw’” Amazon, blatantly interfered in an active procurement, directed his subordinate to conduct an unorthodox “review” prior to a contract award announcement and then stonewalled an investigation into his own political interference. “Corrective action” was used as a way to halt our litigation, delay further investigations and incorrectly give the appearance that only one issue needed to be fixed while giving the impression that the DoD was actually going to fix something. While corrective action can be used to efficiently resolve protests, in reality, this corrective action changed nothing, wasted five months that could have been spent getting to the bottom of these serious concerns, and was designed solely to distract from our broader concerns and reaffirm a decision that was corrupted by the President’s self-interest

I didn't read it, and won't. Amazon got out played by msft. Bezos is an amateur compared to the likes of the DOD team at msft, buying a mansion in DC to host parties, come on Bezos, such an amateur move. Getting into a public pissing match with the POTUS, stupid. Crying foul for months and months and then writing a story about your slippery slope theory, amateur, and locks you out of more cloud business with .gov. I have personally been through this process, albeit not a $10B contract but very very large, and it comes down to relationships. Jeff should be doing everything he can to steal away that msft sales team that came in and made them look like fools so they can win the next bid. He isn't playing against Barnes and Nobles, this is a corporation that will spend tens of millions developing a competing product and give it away for free for years to bankrupt it's competitors, they don't play fair.

You’re being downvoted for no good reason, fact is MS has a long history of winning government contracts using all available means, Amazon looks to me like the nerd who got into a street fight with only his glasses on, no gloves, no knives, no anything.

Except that's not what happened.

First, these are accusations. Second, Amazon influenced the procurement process themselves by being involved in the process that set the criteria -- structuring it in a way that only they should be awarded the contract.

Third, the Amazon main shareholder and acting CEO also owns a newspaper that’s actively involved in fighting Trump.

WaPo doesn't interfere in contract awards or break the law. Trump's many crimes and some mean words is a false equivalency.

As a member of the free and impartial press it should at least try to be impartial, no democracy can survive with non-impartial press, best-case scenario it all turns into a fight among the oligarchy members (as it’s happening right now).

If they don't like the president, they can stop contributing to his party at any point.

Can someone tell me if I’ve summed this up right?

- Amazon colludes behind the scenes to get a contract proposal that on paper only Amazon can fill (e.g. memory sizing options exactly matching things only AWS provides)

- There is a competitive bidding process without prices revealed and Microsoft wins

- Amazon cries no fair and demands to be allowed to bid again now that they know how much Microsoft bid

- Government re-evaluates the deal and picks Microsoft again

- Amazon decides to make whiny posts about how aggrieved they, as a >1.5T company, are

Worth noting that Oracle sued on your first point, and the courts did not agree that there was any actual issues with the RFP. [1]

Also worth noting that their argument is that the President illegally interfered in the bidding process. And that a Judge agreed earlier this year that there was enough issues with the award that they halted the work on the contract. [2]

I want to see Microsoft in the space so there is more competition, but at the same time, there is definitely some issues to be addressed.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/oracle-loses-10b-jedi-clou... [2] https://techcrunch.com/2020/02/13/judge-halts-microsoft-work...

FWIW: This is why people hire lobbyists, to make sure any procurement is written in such a way so that only the client qualifies. Same with tax credits, and government funding.

I wonder why Amazon is so bothered about this deal. If I remember the time period correctly, this is a $1B/year deal. That is a low single digit percentage of AWS revenue, do they really want to anger the government and let themselves be exposed to antitrust investigations.

I wonder if it's less about the revenue and more about the credibility boost that Azure will get if everyone sees the Pentagon going all-in on it.

Maybe this bring lots of other business as well.

If you were to provide for example some data analysis services for DoD, it would certainly make sense to run on same cloud where the data is.

Did you read the AWS blog post? [1]

You are missing a massive part of the story. They are accusing the president of interfering in a public procurement process because of his personal dislike of Bezos/Amazon.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-c...

I read it just now.

It seems that the massive part missed is that AWS claims Trump screwed with AWS.

That's what I was referring to. I added it to my comment to make it less snarky.

Did you read his post? Amazon rigged the selection criteria in their favor.

> Did you read his post? Amazon rigged the selection criteria in their favor.

Which may, legal or not, be a legitimate basis for complaint, but even if so it wouldn't mitigate the utterly indefensible and clearly corrupt (if true) conduct by the government Amazon describes after the selection criteria was set.

Contracting officials corruptly collaborating with Amazon to set the criteria doesn't excuse the DoD subsequently corruptly ignoring the selection criteria to hand the contract to Microsoft as political retribution based on the President’s animus toward Jeff Bezos.

Would the precedent be less dangerous if the contract had been awarded to Amazon?

Clearly. Bezos and top brass must be infuriated given that Amazon was involved in crafting the proposal.

It's good for everybody that there is diversity in cloud. We need multiple leaders in the space to keep costs low.

They got out corrupted on their own setup. Amazon cry me a River.

I don't know how many tens of thousands of small retail businesses are struggling and being hampered by arbitrary government action right now, benefitting Amazon, but it's really hard to feel bad for the $1.5 trillion monopoly right now.

Amazon should probably be broken up and it's whining about losing out on a multi billion dollar government contract.

In fed contracting, ironically, small businesses (especially those owned by women, minorities, disabled veterans, etc) are given preferential treatment sometimes to the detriment of thrift.

Regarding this contract, I don’t care who wins so long as it’s one of the hyper scale vendors. The status quo for DevOps, infra, and managed services in DoD is pure hell.

That other guy is dangerous - _competition_

>> Amazon called the single-supplier framework award “politically corrupted”

I wonder when corporations will start taking the place of governments, when they will wage war against each other and kidnap each other's executives? This is the world we're heading towards. There can only be one winner.

If they keep asking for more legal privileges for corporations, this is what we're going to get.

The government should completely cut corporations out of all contracts before it's too late.

If we have to live in this kind of world can we at least go the full Shadowrun way pretty please. I could see myself mutated in a giant troll wielding a massive minigun ... and I want to see a dragon fly too!

I don't care about the contract one way or the other way.

What I do object to is the use of the word Jedi in this context. Somehow it feels like defiling of a favorite memory.

JEDI is an acronym, but HN appears to like not capitalizing it. And to me at least, it feels less bad when its all caps.

AWS blog post: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-c...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24379304

I think the "dangerous" precedent being set is now we can stop assuming AWS is the only "cloud" out there. It always amazes me how 1) so many small companies assume AWS must be the only way to go and 2) once there they are so terrified to run work loads on other services. *

* worth noting this is my anecdotal experience, would love to hear stories of which companies do the contrary.

The $10 billion was printed out of thin air by the Federal Reserve Bank and given to the government in exchange for some bonds which they also created out of thin air... And then that money was given to Microsoft as part of this phony contract.

The real story here is that Microsoft is getting $10 billion of free money from the government and Amazon is upset about it.

Wow. Amazon’s blog post about this comes off as remarkably petty and emotional. Very strange look for a massive corporation.

I through it was 10 billion

Wikipedia agrees[0]. Looks like the article and headline have now been updated.

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

Yes, they updated

The history of the JEDI contract is interesting[2018]. It was contested by Oracle and also by IBM, and was widely seen as a last-gasp attempt by two entrenched 'enterprise tech' vendors to remain relevant in the cloud marketplace.

But as [2018] notes, Oracle complained.

> In the complaint, Oracle dives into deep detail about two DOD officials whom it alleges had ties to Amazon Web Services, the cloud company thought to be in the frontrunning for JEDI. Oracle believes those two officials influenced the JEDI strategy to be tailor-fit for an AWS win.

The interesting thing here is that both Oracle and IBM had an initial strategy of painting the JEDI requirements as exceeding DOD's needs, an interesting tactic given their relative lack of scale -- they are in capex terms also-rans in the cloud market.

After a review, in April 2019, the Pentagon said that the employee's actions did not affect the process and further ruled IBM and Oracle out of the process[2019], while retaining Amazon's and Microsoft's bids.

Microsoft was finally awarded the contract in late October, which prompted Amazon to claim "political influence" because of Trump's statements re the contract, and led to a further legal challenge[2020].

[2018] https://www.fedscoop.com/ibms-protest-10b-jedi-cloud-contrac...

[2019] https://www.nextgov.com/it-modernization/2019/12/after-two-y...

[2020] https://tech.newstatesman.com/cloud/amazon-pentagon-contract...

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=n-86ax7TYNM

From the AWS blog post [0].

> This time, AWS offered a lower cost by several tens of millions of dollars.

On a contract worth $10bn does tens of millions really make a difference?

[0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/publicsector/jedi-why-we-will-c...

> On a contract worth $10bn does tens of millions really make a difference?

In government contracting, if cost is supposedly the formal deciding criteria, yes.

The allegation isn't that the cost amount was significant as a value amount, but that it's one of many examples raised of the DoD allegedly making decisions for which pretexts are offered that are inconsistent with the facts.

The laws of government contracting don't allow the kind of arbitrarily moving goalposts that Amazon’s description of the DoD behavior would indicate, and the reason it doesn't is as a safeguard against corrupt political favoritism with contracts as patronage.

Focussing on whether the cost qua cost is significant in isolation is focussing is missing the forest for the trees.

The laws of government contracting? What laws do you speak of? By the way there is corrupt political favoritism going on at all levels of government and it is naive to assume otherwise.

Yes. If two proposals both of the same exact technical level and Amazon was a cheaper price, then the government is supposed to go with the one that saves the taxpayer money.

The government should provide detailed evidence to the taxpayers as to why it needs to go with a more expensive options.

I am all for having competition in the space, but if Microsoft is not giving a clearly superior product for the money then why should the taxpayers spend extra money on it? Although, I am willing to listen to the case that the government needs to have the competition in the space to ensure its own future interests and that is worth an extra cost. But that is not the case that is being presented. At least not that I have seen.

Hence the joke about everything from bridges to the Space Shuttle being "built by the lowest bidder."

That is probably the weakest and least-relevant argument in the entire post.

And a good lesson on why you should never include known-weak talking points in an argument -- many think that components of an argument are additive, when in reality they're more multiplicative: if you have one weak link, all the opposition needs to do is shape the narrative to make it seem like that's a critical component, then dismantle the whole argument by tearing that single point apart.

You've set a truly dangerous precedent of not giving me billions of dollars. I wasn't aware that AWS executives were whiny babies.

I know HN doesn't like a non-serious tone, but do these clearly massively self-interested guys really deserve more than mockery? They're not trying to alert the public to the horrors of a bloated military-industrial complex. They're trying to get their beak wet and crying when they didn't get any.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com