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Comment by zod50 | Hacker News Reader

> The Pentagon said in the press release that it still needs enterprise-scale cloud capability and announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract, adding that they are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs.

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I can understand Google employees' passion to curb the power of military. I myself strongly support keeping government's power in check too. But the hatred towards the military, to the point of actively sabotaging military's effort to improve itself? That I don't understand. I really wish those employees travel back in time to experience the European people's life under Mongolian's reign, or the Aztec's life when Spaniards attacked, or the life of people in Manchurian when Nurgaci's tribe was rising in the early 17th century, or the life of Chinese people merely a hundred years ago when Japanese invaded. Shouldn't it mean something when millions of innocent people were slaughtered in a matter of years, or when a civilization (especially a more advanced one) got destroyed, or when a nation's human rights were stepped on?

P.S., it's worth mentioning that it was the Manchurian who restored slavery in Qing Dynasty. The word Nucai in Chinese or 명사 in Korean, meaning Your Slave, was such an honorary title that for more than 300 years until early 20th century only those who were trusted by the royals could use. Yeah, don't wanna be a slave? Build a good army.

isn't the US Military the equivalent of the "Manchu" here? (The US Military wiped out the natives, took all their land, and brought and enforced slavery on this land?) Didn't the US just annex Hawaii as an official state a few years ago? Isn't all of California land that the military just kinda stole from Mexico?

The answer to all of your questions is no, but this kind of discussion belongs on reddit anyways.

>Didn't the US just annex Hawaii as an official state a few years ago?

I suppose if you consider 1898 a few years ago.

it became a state in 1959 with everything finally crushed out of it - before that it was still a quasi territory with more independence

I knew I'd get this. Yes, true, but 1898 was the date of "annexation"[0].

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

And if they both say no...?

They'll be forced to do what they should have done from the get go – invest into building their own infrastructure.

Considering Amazon was suing over the previous contract, and MS won iy I don't see why either wouldn't bid. The money is huge.

Then, it means that they are run by people who are not blinded by greed, and care about earth .... Ahh who am I kidding! They will both say yes. Amazon even sued the government for it

Wow, that has got to sting for Google Cloud and Oracle.

Google withdrew from the original bid due to objections by its employees.

Google was already considered unlikely to win before its withdrawal, so I'd be hesitant to attribute the withdrawal primarily to this.

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

If GCP have fedramp high that’s roughly equivalent to AWS govcloud (fedramp high ~= IL4).

AWS and Azure also have IL6 regions (able to hold secret information).

Finally AWS runs a top secret cloud for the intelligence community. I believe Azure announced a similar project but not when it’ll be open for business.

A memo went out last year about all federal networks supporting IPv6 only in the coming years. Since Google's cloud doesn't really support IPv6 at all, I don't think they were going to win the contract anyway.

That was an excuse and a convenient cover story. GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government. Couple that with the leaked plans to shut the thing down because it's an abject failure (it's a money pit for Google), and why would you want to be on the platform of certain disaster?

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

> GCP can't even serve the needs of large organizations, they definitely can't service the government.

Not sure where you’ve gotten this information from. GCP serves many “large organizations” including government agencies [0].

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

This feels very hyperbolic to me. Either way, demos don’t always work out the way you intend.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/solutions/government

Your example of a "large organization" is the state of Arizona? Australia Post, a tiny regional mail delivery company? What's your definition of "large"?

Also, it's evident they cannot service those customers. Australia Post has a large contract with AWS. Whoops.

I've worked in many large organizations. I've received GCP pitches. I've participated in evaluations of GCP as a technology solution. It's substantially worse than Azure, plus according to their leaked massive losses on the product it'll be shuttered this decade.

>This feels very hyperbolic to me

Their dashboards are typical Angular heavyweight clunk, with confusing error messages, infinite loading spinners and things break constantly. It's been discussed here extensively. [1]

Their actual decent products (BigQuery) are hamstrung by the rest of the failing platform.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25357409

You know for all the shit Microsoft gets here, Azure is pretty amazing to work with. I'm gonna say it.

The best thing that happened for Windows Server and Exchange is Microsoft started to run them at scale in house. Suddenly things that had been complained about for decades magically started getting fixed :)

Yes Australia post, the tiny regional mail carrier that delivers over a million items a day.

GCP has some good bits. They're just running into the same problem everyone had catching Windows: it's really hard to compete from a fresh start with something that's been incrementally improved over years of significant use.

Especially when you're Google (our customers aren't as smart as us) competing with Amazon.

It serves companies like checks notes Google, Apple, Spotify. I think it works just fine.

As for anecdata, the only cloud platform I've heard nothing positive is Azure.

GCP runs on Google, Google doesn’t run on GCP.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/06/04/goo...

+ Twitter and Snapchat

> Twitter

Except the most important part of Twitter -- timelines, of course. [1]

> Snapchat

Except the $1 billion contract from AWS, of course. [2]

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2020/12/15/twitter-taps-aws-for-its-l...

[2] https://fortune.com/2017/02/09/snap-inc-signs-big-aws-deal/

That doesn't mean GCP is bad unless they totally switched to AWS. I believe this is just part of multi cloud approach.

If AWS is running 100% of timelines it's not a "multi cloud approach". AWS is the bedrock of the entire Twitter experience.

Multi cloud means cross cloud redundancy, but there's none of that here.

Google Cloud bowed out of the race several years ago

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-heres-why-were-pulling-...

Looks like good news for VMware, I believe one of the few players focusing in multi-cloud setups

Everyone bar AWS is focusing on multicloud. And VMware's offerings are utter shite and very poor features wise ( where it matters), so I doubt they'll be impacted.

( 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)

And IBM Cloud.

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