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Helianthus

...It sounds like the CIA is being a secretive, but normal customer.

I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription.

(I guess I assume they can do that anyway.)

But where's my free outrage?

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Indeed.

"I came in here expecting firm proof that the CIA was using Amazon to spy on my Prime subscription."

While that's no doubt already happening, it's also abundantly obvious that Amazon is one of very few organisations that anyone, CIA or not, would go to for consulting/professional-services when setting up a large-scale in-house "cloud computing" infrastructure.

There's not a large pool of companies with demonstrated experience, apart from Amazon there's maybe Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Rackspace - I wouldn't add Apple to that list (since their "cloud" track record is pretty poor), from there you end up with vendor-lockin from options like IBM, Dell, and perhaps to a lesser extent Cisco.

Out of all of those options, Amazon seem to easily be the "best choice" if I were to be setting up a decade-long partnership to deploy a multi-data-center scale private cloud.

Most of the time government hires (and has for a long time) the traditional defense contractors or government-specialized small contractors to do their IT work. It is actually mildly impressive that a 'normal business' IT provider like AWS has broken into the government field.

See http://www.lockheedmartin.com/isgs/

Often these contractors, with experience in getting and administering federal contractors, will hire other contractors to do some of the other work. It's quite possible that's what's happened here.

Pretty sure Apple's iCloud runs on a mix of azure and vmware vsphere clusters, fwiw.

The fox is inside the henhouse now.

The fox was always inside the henhouse. The fox just agreed to pay discount prices for some of the chickens.

Kidding aside, doesn't this seem like exactly the sort of move you would want your government agencies to make? Take advantage of free-market services where appropriate, and not get all "NIH"?

>>> and not get all "NIH"

What do you mean by this? I did not get this reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_invented_here

Haha I work in the life sciences and I thought the GP was referring to the National Institutes of Health, which was confusing!

At one point in time I knew some people that did contract work at National Institutes of Health, and the way they talked about it, NIH might as well stand for Not Invented Here.

I don't think the fox/henhouse analogy is as foregone as you describe. Say what you will about the CIA and the law, but there are lots of restrictions on their work inside US borders (where much AWS infrastructure is located).

Furthermore, while I'm acting mostly on assumption here, I doubt the agency is going to Amazon because they can't build and/or afford their own setup.

I doubt the agency is going to Amazon because they can't build and/or afford their own setup

I can build and I can afford my own versions of a great many things. I still buy from vendors.

Anyway, AWS is heavily segregated. Simply having consumer instances is not going to enable them to snoop your traffic, and simply having consumer instances is not going to enable them to make Amazon give them your traffic if they couldn't make Amazon give it to them before.

Yes, well, a fox inside the henhouse is not a problem until it starts going after chickens.

um the CIA and related organizations where some of the first major users of computing - they are investing into Quantum computers for example.

So not exactly NIH unless your claiming that Tommy Flowers etal at the Post Office and Bletchly park invented this

I thought the fox was on the riverbank with the grain.

But which is which?

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