In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places

I’m not the biggest fan of AWS, but I feel like giving $10B to Oracle or IBM, well, you might as well just burn the money.

Oh Oracle - first your sales people came every year and jacked up the licenses, and we fled. Then you came up with plans to monetize Java, and we fled. And then this. Just die already, OK - your old business model is dead and your attempts to make a new one would even embarrass Elsevier

Lots of drama to this story, between the apparent sabotage from Oracle to the politics of the president not favoring AWS just for spite, to the Pentagon&#x27;s acronym for its cloud move: JEDI.<p>The article states that Microsoft does not yet have the security clearances for JEDI yet, but is working on it, but nowhere in the piece does it mention Google&#x27;s cloud services. Are they in the running as well? Are there any other giant enterprise cloud platform businesses that I&#x27;m unaware of? Dropbox uses AWS.<p>The other interesting thing about this, circling back to Oracle, is the changing of the technological guard here. One can imagine all sorts of government databases running on IBM mainframes, using Oracle software. But now, the shift to enterprise cloud has arrived. I guess this must be happening across the entire industry.

I know we tend to think of cloud-agnostic architectures as over-engineering, YAGNI, etc., but for a massive, massively expensive, mission critical government cloud perhaps it’s a good idea?<p>Apart from fail-over&#x2F;redundancy benefits, it would avoid lock-in and drastically improve negotiating leverage that could force ongoing competitiveness and accountability.<p>The engineering costs are significant but still a drop in the bucket compared to the size of these mega-contracts.

Half the shit the gov buys and mandates people use nobody doing work actually wants to use. Picking Oracle or some two week old fly by night hub zone contractor to handle this award would be typical. The unusual thing would be for it to actually go to a provider with services that are useful and people want to use. - speaking as someone who has done a significant amount of .gov work.

The winner probably should have been AWS and close behind was azure and then Google.<p>IBM and Oracle just are not at the same level but I do suspect they have the best sales teams for government deals.

The government already contracted General Dynamics to build their own cloud called MilCloud. It had a lot of problems so naturally they are developing MilCloud2.0

I guess I don&#x27;t understand the need for this contract in the first place.<p>Is it normal in the private sector for companies to spend $1B&#x2F;yr on cloud services? I feel like at that price point you&#x27;re better off building out your own infra for most stuff, and using the cloud only for the remaining $10M - $100M fraction where you really do need dynamic scaling.

I guess owning the Washington Post (Bezos paper), and its overwhelmingly anti Trump stance over the last 3 years, had its price. This is about Bezos IMHO, nothing else.

This headline seems... misleading. There&#x27;s only one high places foe mentioned, and that&#x27;s Trump. Every other high level official mentioned seems to be doing Trump&#x27;s bidding on this.<p>Also, how is having someone high up intervening in a business process a big violation of free market principles? I don&#x27;t recall the article mentioning this either. As I think about it, this just reeks of crony capitalism. Didn&#x27;t we just (2008 or so) decide that was a bad way to do an economy?<p>Isn&#x27;t the NYT slant generally in favor of laissez faire free markets? Why the switch here?

What is it that the government is buying and how can the government ever trust (for this sort of thing) a private company. And surely you can set up faster (performance per buck) more secure data centres for 10 billion bucks?<p>I just don’t get it, but I guess someone will say government can’t do anything and that’s enough.

The worst thing about this in my opinion is that as much as I personally dislike Trump, the WaPo has lowered the quality of its journalism tremendously over the past decade and so unfortunately Trump’s critiques of the WaPo are not lacking in substance.<p>Bezos should have stepped in to make certain that the WaPo improve the quality of its journalism even if the easiest path to profits is just to provide entertaining stories to the #resist partisans.<p>There is plenty to write serious investigative journalism about that will have the consequence of weakening Trump politically (if that is the goal) so there was no need to become a tabloid.<p>Arguably the WaPo’s reporting on Saudi Arabia led to the grudge match that culminated in outing Bezos’ philandering, and the subsequent major decrease in Bezos’ wealth.<p>KSA is led by an abhorrent group of royals, but the WaPo’s coverage of the disappearance of khashoggi was tabloidesque and immature.

Amazon needs IBM mainframes in their data centers. They are still king of highly consistent and available systems.