Pentagon cancels $10B cloud contract that Amazon, Microsoft were fighting over

At the same time, the near-guarantee of the vendor that has the lock means they have far fewer incentives to be responsive to changing needs by the client.

In addition, given the lock-in, whenever 3 or 5 years maintenance agreement contracts near their end, the Vendor has significant leverage to demand more $$$ for pretty much the same level of service.

The overall result is a lower quality product that can eventually put the buyer years behind the current best-of-breed capabilities, all at a significantly higher cost.

Using standardised primitives, like the case with Kubernetes, leaves your infrastructure prepared to be migrated to a different cloud provider with much less friction and effort. You will still probably need some shims and/or abstractions for common patterns (caching, persistence, etc.) but if you can decouple completely your platform from the vendor's platform your organisation gets much more leverage, both for negotiation purposes as for regulations, in case there is a need to swap cloud providers your work is more-or-less cut out for you. When you didn't prepare for a cloud agnostic environment you will have years of migration to be done, for services, libraries and so on.

It's a major pain in the ass to be vendor locked-in and a huge cost, in time, opportunities and money.

I suppose if you consider 1898 a few years ago.

Unlike AWS and Azure, Google doesn't offer any GovCloud regions, only Fedramp which seems to apply to unclassified data only.

I've had demos from GCP sales reps, and the platform is shambolic. It doesn't even work during sales presentations.

( Their offerings were so bad they were forced to sell their vSphere as a service arm to a low cost hosting provider. Even with the popularity of that dumpster fire in DCs and most companies moving away from DCs they still couldn't capture any market share)

A couple of points. The whitehouse blocked any disclosures of discussions / pressure even to the inspector general. They also issued notices to staff not to talk to IG. That's a pretty darn good sign that there WAS involvement by the whitehouse.

The DoD is dropping this case because they were asked to reveal some of this information. Instead of disclosing it, they elect to cancel the contract. This was a specific issue in the current case, would DoD have to reveal this type of communication from whitehouse.

Yes - people claim no pressure / no involvement - but it's blindingly obvious that there is a very good chance there was pressure.

I have past experience with govt contracting so have a sense for what the flows look like.

Contract selection put on hold, involvement of a political person (probably esper here). Ban on anyone talking about the potential discussion to internal auditors. Those are all the red flags.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/28/technology/trump-jedi-pen...

“I will be asking them to look at it very closely to see what’s going on because I have had very few things where there’s been such complaining,” Trump said. "Not only complaining from the media — or at least asking questions about it from the media — but complaining from different companies like Microsoft and Oracle and IBM. Great companies are complaining about it. So we’re going to take a look at it. We’ll take a very strong look at it. Thank you very much everybody.”

He head already shown at this point that he was an old boys club type of guy that would go after anyone who disagreed and support anyone who kissed his ass, so anyone having a hand in the selection of the winner of the contract that wanted favor with the president would obviously attempt to influence the outcome to not be Amazon.

He should have kept his mouth shut on such a massive pending contract, but it's pretty obvious by now that keeping his mouth shut isn't something he's physically capable of doing.

Now instead of having started on a crucial service that is needed by our military we're looking at likely further years of delays. All because the president was butthurt over some mean words in a newspaper.

That doesn't matter. We're not talking about criminal proceedings, where anyone has to be proven guilty beyond reasonable doubt. This is, at most, a civil law process. And it's the DoD canceling its own contract, which they are probably allowed to do for whatever reason.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative#C...

I mentioned in another comment that George Lucas tried to sue over people calling the SDI "Star Wars" back in 1985. I can't find any evidence now, but I believe he once sued either the Air Force or NRO (can't remember which) over a mission patch with an x-wing on it.

Or maybe add real progressive taxation that would get the $500k comps back into normal territory (by, among other things, taxing dividends, share options and the like accordingly).

From there, we can give the agency the budget to do the job, and let someone who's actually close to the situation decide whether it makes more sense to contract it out or build an in-person team. A bunch of legislators who are well-known to be perpetually too busy conducting fundraising lunches with lobbyists to actually read the text of the bills they're crafting and voting on are never going to be making informed decisions on matters at this level of detail.

I'd take ONE top faang engineer over 8 government software contractors. There's so much tribal knowledge out there that people in the Midwest just don't have, not to mention a can-do attitude.

It blew my mind the first time I worked with a guy from Microsoft on something. We were having issues with some code, and he just popped open the kernel and started actively debugging things that I'd only vaguely even heard about. I feel like I was twice as good at engineering after that experience alone.

I had the same experience from the other direction later on.. a team of smart, hard-working coders had been dealing with stability/perf issues for years on some product. I was able to root cause and straighten all of them out in a couple of weeks, even though this was in an area of software development using a set of tools I'd never touched before.

I'll bet a single FAANG-hardened code wizard could outperform 20 or 30 government coders.

The reason is not talent, but process. Governments are bureaucratic by nature, companies are meritocratic by nature. Obviously this is a vast simplification and there are exceptions but I wouldn’t bet on your team being one.

If you think people's claims that they aren't motivated by money are anything other than lies they've learned they're expected to tell, perhaps you're just as ignorant as your $150K hires who have no idea that FAANG companies pay their developers $500K or more (which is the only reason you are able to hire them).

You still have to pass a marijuana drug test to work there, for heaven's sake.

What security engineer worth his salt is going to accept half the pay to work for the government where things move at a snails pace?

Or in another words, you're trying to find the one honest person, in the stack of AccgemloitteBMizantPMGataBCS proposals. And everyone else is bidding with the profit expectation of tossing entry-level, over-hyped developers on it, and then crossing their fingers nothing goes wrong.

Good in this case means meeting most or all of the project objectives. If they pursue a "perfect" solution, they may not do even that, let alone realize the other social goods you're hoping for.

Our government is not capable of efficiently building and managing AWS style infra. Or designing new ASICS for consumer products.

Helping with R&D? Strategic planning? Sure. But not doing stuff like that at scale.