Pentagon Splits $9 Billion Cloud Contract Between 4 Firms 49
Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will share in the Pentagon's $9 billion contract to build its cloud computing network, a year after accusations of politicization over the previously announced contract and a protracted legal battle resulted in the military starting over in its award process. The Associated Press reports: The Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability is envisioned to provide access to unclassified, secret and top-secret data to military personnel all over the globe. It is anticipated to serve as a backbone for the Pentagon's modern war operations, which will rely heavily on unmanned aircraft and space communications satellites, but will still need a way to quickly get the intelligence from those platforms to troops on the ground. The contract will be awarded in parts, with a total estimated completion date of June 2028, the Pentagon said in a statement.
Last July, the Pentagon announced it was cancelling its previous cloud computing award, then named JEDI. At the time, the Pentagon said that due to delays in proceeding with the contract, technology had changed to the extent that the old contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, no longer met DOD's needs. It did not mention the legal challenges behind those delays, which had come from Amazon, the losing bidder. Amazon had questioned whether former President Donald Trump's administration had steered the contract toward Microsoft due to Trump's adversarial relationship with Amazon's chief executive officer at the time, Jeff Bezos. A report by the Pentagon's inspector general did not find evidence of improper influence, but it said it could not determine the extent of administration interactions with Pentagon decision-makers because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses. "It's the most important cloud deal to come out of the Beltway," said analyst Daniel Ives, who monitors the cloud industry for Wedbush Securities. "It's about the Pentagon as a reference customer. It says significant accolades about what they think about that vendor, and that's the best reference customer you could have in that world."
Last July, the Pentagon announced it was cancelling its previous cloud computing award, then named JEDI. At the time, the Pentagon said that due to delays in proceeding with the contract, technology had changed to the extent that the old contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, no longer met DOD's needs. It did not mention the legal challenges behind those delays, which had come from Amazon, the losing bidder. Amazon had questioned whether former President Donald Trump's administration had steered the contract toward Microsoft due to Trump's adversarial relationship with Amazon's chief executive officer at the time, Jeff Bezos. A report by the Pentagon's inspector general did not find evidence of improper influence, but it said it could not determine the extent of administration interactions with Pentagon decision-makers because the White House would not allow unfettered access to witnesses. "It's the most important cloud deal to come out of the Beltway," said analyst Daniel Ives, who monitors the cloud industry for Wedbush Securities. "It's about the Pentagon as a reference customer. It says significant accolades about what they think about that vendor, and that's the best reference customer you could have in that world."
Tax money revolving door (Score:3, Insightful)
Kids, this is how political parties turn public tax money into party funds, by going through the govt contracts to private companies and then back to the party through campaign contributions.
Every step 100% legal following the law written by the lawmakers from the very same parties getting the money.
The only thing being argued about was which companies get to play in this round. In any other country in the world this would be called corruption.
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Kids, this is how political parties turn public tax money into party funds, by going through the govt contracts to private companies and then back to the party through campaign contributions.
Every step 100% legal following the law written by the lawmakers from the very same parties getting the money.
The only thing being argued about was which companies get to play in this round. In any other country in the world this would be called corruption.
Sure, just send an e-mail to pork@congress.gov and promise them a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions and you'll get a multi billion dollar contract. American politicians are cheaply and easily bought.
Re:Tax money revolving door (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. According to the FEC [fec.gov]:
Separately, from the same source, and to protect against precisely the kind of thing you describe:
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Federal government contractors are prohibited from making contributions or expenditures in connection with federal elections.
Ever hear of Citizens United Court Case ? Also the source of contributions do not need to be disclosed. So a company can send money to a subsidiary or a related company which can then bribe^H^H^H^H^H donate.
Some US politicians have been trying to force disclosure of the real source of campaign contributions, but the bill keeps getting blocked. Why would someone what to end their own personal gravy train.
Re:Tax money revolving door (Score:4, Informative)
I see that you skipped right over the first quote I provided. The FEC clarifies this [fec.gov] for you:
You're also confused about the Citizens United case, which specifically does not apply to donations to politicians, parties, or their campaigns. Donations to those groups cannot be anonymous -- you can search them [fec.gov] online if you want.
The problem is not what you don't know, but what you know that just ain't so.
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to protect against precisely the kind of thing you describe
So you are saying that in the near future, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will definitely, 100%, NOT make any campaign contributions to either parties?
Hands up, anybody believe this will happen?
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Yep, those of us who live in the real world believe that.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com] ... "Microsoft also announced it would change the name of its PAC to the Microsoft Corporation Stakeholders Voluntary PAC in order to make it more clear that it is funded, like all corporate PACs, by voluntary contributions from employees."
https://www.opensecrets.org/or... [opensecrets.org] ... "NOTE: Organizations themselves cannot contribute to candidates and party committees."
How much do you think those companies have donated to pol
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to protect against precisely the kind of thing you describe
So you are saying that in the near future, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will definitely, 100%, NOT make any campaign contributions to either parties?
Hands up, anybody believe this will happen?
The corporations won't, the people associated with the corporations will. The corporations will also offer the parties favorable rates that are totally unrelated to the massive government advertising programs they are involved in.
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Right but they are entirely free to engage in as much 'issue advertising' as they like and our respective parties have carefully carved out identitarian positions around a handful of especially animating issues in response - precisely so those big players can effectively campaign for them.
This is what the 'take the money out of politics, let's do more campaign finance rules' people don't understand. You will never take money out of politics because living in a society is fundamentally about politics, and m
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This is what the 'take the money out of politics, let's do more campaign finance rules' people don't understand. You will never take money out of politics because living in a society is fundamentally about politics, and modern money is really fundamentally a promise which is fundamentally a form of speech.
Citizens United was very rightly decided most campaign finance restrictions ultimately just make who is buying influence more opaque. ...
I think we should lift all restrictions on political donations, non-profits should not have their tax status depend on their political speech or lack thereof. We should have one SIMPLE rule candidates for federal office should have to publish ALL donations (even if its a nickel) to the FEC within 24hours and FEC shall be required to publish all reported donations with 24 hours of receiving the report. Just go pure sunshine - let voters decide if its a problem Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates or Jerry Falwell Jr or whoever gave $100 million to $Senator or not.
Lol. lmao.
You'll never get all money out of politics but you can surely as hell do better than the status quo in the US.
Look at other countries with more sensible regulations and public campaign financing. It's not perfect but sure as hell better than "Exxon 'donated' $100k each to a bunch of senators and they voted for their interests". This is known but doesn't matter because what are you gonna do, vote against them, and thus for a guy who's even more bought?
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It's not perfect but sure as hell better than "Exxon 'donated' $100k each to a bunch of senators and they voted for their interests".
You know that Exxon's maximum donation to any Senator is $0, and that the maximum donation for any individual is (as of 2021-2022) $2900 for a primary election plus $2900 for a general election, right?
Any individual donating $100k to a Senator would be illegal, as would ExxonMobil (or any corporation) donating $0.01. That is the whole point of this thread.
I can only imagine how shitty this will be. (Score:3)
Because commercial monopolies work so well. (Score:1)
This is moderately good news for America's defenses, actually. They used to have ironclad "second source" rules for strategic goods. That went out the window somewhere on the path to ever more graft and corruption. So now that idea is back, sort-of, even if only as an appeasing gesture to the "tech giants" meaning those have too much power and won't abide just one of them taking it all.
As to "works best", well, what does nine milliard dollar buy these days?
If I was in charge I'd build my own "cloud" for h
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Excuse me, including Oracle in the lot isn't going to win my vote of confidence. And MS's idea of security is get people to use bullet points.
Re:Because commercial monopolies work so well. (Score:4, Insightful)
If I was in charge I'd build my own "cloud" for half the money and on my own networks, not connected to anything else.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Yes, the government rolling their own instead of buying off the shelf always comes out cheaper. WTF are you smoking?
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I didn't read anything that implied every single solution developed in this program needs to be spread over all four clouds. It's quite likely that if you are working on one application for one department, you will be dealing exclusively or at least primarily with one of the cloud providers.
It is little different to any large enterprise. My company (25k+ employees) is primarily an Azure shop, but we do use products in AWS from time to time. I wouldn't be surprised if Google cloud and Oracle are somewhere in
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I didn't read anything that implied every single solution developed in this program needs to be spread over all four clouds. It's quite likely that if you are working on one application for one department, you will be dealing exclusively or at least primarily with one of the cloud providers.
Then, again going back to the point the AC tried to make, you don't gain anything. Those apps are locked into those cloud providers and you are single-sourced for them. All you get is increased overall complexity for the total environment. The better choice, from a DR and vendor independence point of view, would be to make those apps multi-cloud, but then you greatly increase the engineering requirements, especially trying to deal with 4 different providers.
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Multi-cloud has nothing to do with disaster recovery or vendor independence. You don't code the capability twice, once for both providers, and then just load balance between them. No one (or at least almost no one) does that. Plenty of pundits write out it, but no one who has thought it through does it.
The best case scenario where multi-cloud helps with business continuity (not DR specifically) is if you have a very basic fail-over process built into a different cloud. The cost of development is light (so i
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Any single project is going to settle on one or the other, not try to juggle all 4 (except maybe a few cornerstones like email and authentication). This way new projects will have a choice which preserves competition, and at least existing projects could migrate by solving 'only' the technical hurdles, without being administrativ
Re: Because commercial monopolies work so well. (Score:2)
This isn't going to be meaningfully different than the government building it themselves. They are just taking advantage of the workforces and existing products of these companies. The government will almost certainly be given their own private clouds within these providers whenever that is requested. Classified documents won't just be sitting in the same S3 storage servers that the public uses.
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I'm not so sure about that - AWS has some key features, as does GCP. For example, anything to do with video is probably best done in AWS, anything to do with AI is probably best done in GCP. Anything Windows-y probably is easiest in Azure. I guess the government has some Oracle databases, which would probably best park in Oracle (shame they won't re-architect to make use of something better, but there you go). Running some services in one cloud, with others in another isn't really much of a problem, and it
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Cloud works best when you lock in to one, now they will spread this across four services lowering security and increasing cost.
Not for very large enterprises. It usually isn't feasible for a large company or government to constrain themselves to one cloud. The most glaring reason is it limits the third party vendors they can use, since some vendors only host their services on one cloud. It also limits the number of services they have access to, since there isn't 100% parity across all cloud providers.
The Pentagon is large enough that they will reach a high level of scale on all four platforms. Most likely you will still see individ
The Mythical Cloud Month? (Score:4, Funny)
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What next, they'll hire 9 women to produce a baby in one month?
+1 Funny...in an odd way
The US is done? (Score:1)
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Nah, don't worry! Nothing worse will happen than your getting a $9B web site that works crappily because it is distributed among the worst features of four cloud providers blaming each other.
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And you think on-premise servers aren't hackable? Have you seen the amount of money companies spend on security specialists for their on-premise servers? Have you seen those DMZs and proper MFA? Nope, neither have I. Have you seen those SQL Server 2008 servers with encryption turned off, still humming away in those on-prem closets? Yep, I certainly have. Security is a "nice to have," an afterthought, when companies host on-prem.
In a recent pen test, a security firm my company contracted, sent everyone a phi
Why compete then, wasn't that the point? (Score:1)
Oracle? (Score:2)
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I agree with the sentiment, but the truth is that Oracle Cloud is probably a pretty decent option for hosting Oracle databases and other Oracle software.
Everything developed four times? (Score:3)
Great, so now I, as a taxpayer, have to pay to develop four versions of everything, and the added cost of integrating it all.
They should have agreed to split the contract between any cloud providers that provided standardized API, and made it easy to move workloads between vendors.
At least that would have benefited everyone by reducing lock-in
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While I agree that using four cloud providers does increase overhead, I don't think it's quite 4 times the work. Consider SQL Server. If you host it on AWS or Azure or whatever, all you have to do is change the connection string and you're golden. If you have to port to PostGres, now you have a lot more work to do, but that's not specifically tied to the cloud provider, that's tied to the choice of technology.
Similarly, consider hosting a web app. All the cloud providers offer various infrastructure-as-a-se
Oracle cloud? (Score:2)
WTF is that? Has to be awarded due to some lobbying/political rather than merits.
Chaos (Score:2)
not between (Score:2)
Not "between." "Among." Between = 2; Among >2.
Maybe a standard will emerge? (Score:2)
Fueling court-troll Oracle (Score:1)
Oracle's evil court tactics paid off, it got a chunk of the contract. The crying brat got its way, making it even brattier.
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Correction, it was Amazon, not Oracle. My bad.
Reminds of the Simpsons episode where Lisa decided to screw up a BBQ party to protest eating meat. Her mom shouted, "Bart, stop that now!" When Bart pointed out the error, mom replied, "Sorry, habit."
What technology changed? (Score:1)
Does anyone know the specific reasons for the change? Or is it so secret they'd have to kill you for revealing it?
Isn't multicloud an anti-pattern? (Score:2)
IBM MIA? (Score:2)
GOMA ... share your toys! (Score:2)
"It's about the Pentagon as a reference customer.
"Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will share....
Looks like the members of the GOMA cloud team won't have any marketing advantage over each other
There are reasons, and there are reasons... (Score:2)
If (in a decidedly different kind of society) we were to attempt to ignore politics, legal maneuvering and conspiracy theories for just one moment... what the Pentagon has done here could simply be referred to as "hedging your bets," or alternatively, "not putting all of your eggs in one basket." In that kind of analysis, naturally, we might want to ask: why would the Pentagon decide that they needed to take such measures? Is it possible that, while Amazon's and Microsoft's respective lawyers were throwing
Or in other words (Score:1)
We want to expose a four-dimensional attack matrix.