Pentagon Awaits Possible Amazon Challenge Over Cloud Deal (apnews.com) 50
Amazon must decide soon if it will protest the Pentagon's awarding of a $10 billion cloud computing contract to rival Microsoft, with one possible grievance being the unusual attention given the project by President Donald Trump. From a report: Amazon was long thought to be the front-runner in the competition for the huge military contract. Its Amazon Web Services division is far ahead of second-place Microsoft in cloud computing, and Amazon has experience handling highly classified government data. It survived earlier legal challenges after the Defense Department eliminated rival bidders Oracle and IBM and whittled the competition down to the two Seattle area tech giants before choosing Microsoft last week. And what else distinguishes the losing bidder? Amazon and its CEO Jeff Bezos, who also owns The Washington Post, have been frequent targets of Trump's criticism. The Pentagon was preparing to make its final decision when Trump publicly waded into the fray in July, saying he had heard complaints about the process and that the administration would "take a very long look." He said other companies told him that the contract "wasn't competitively bid." Oracle, in particular, had argued that Pentagon officials unfairly favored Amazon for the winner-take-all contract.
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I don't know why anyone would "want AWS". It's the default option when it comes to cloud, but it's the epitome of duct tape engineering. It's hard to use, inconsistent, and it just looks bad.
Re: Inability to follow orders (Score:2)
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The reason Microsoft does well is precisely because much of their stuff, and most definitely their developer stuff, integrates nicely, better in fact than anything else out there.
Integrates nicely with their spyware OS, you mean?
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I can run a VM running windows in linux... what're you talking about though?
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Huh? I can write "Microsoft" code that runs and lives in Linux...
Microsoft is not a programming language. What are you talking about?
Re: Inability to follow orders (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who routinely integrates Microsoft's latest technologies... this just seems like a sad attempt at trolling.
A few of MS's new projects are decent, but they still suffer from two major issues: Incomplete support and NIH syndrome.
Speaking of the latter first, they have gotten better at implementing industry standards and working with outside vendors, but they still try very hard to ensure that only a full-MS stack gets complete system functionality. Your webserver must be IIS, your MTA must be Exchange, and your virtualization must be Hyper-V, or various things simply won't work. I'm not talking about "this is the default" but rather "you cannot do this job with anything else just because we say so."
Even when things work, there are still often features left unfinished or disjoint from other Microsoft projects. The most glaring examples of this lie in Group Policy. New features get added to Windows, IE, or Edge, but the group policy options to configure the new features isn't released until a few months later, leaving a period of guesswork as to how to enforce baseline configuration. Do we write registry changes directly? Buy a third-party solution? Wait for Microsoft and hope for the best?
Now, I certainly won't claim that any particular other vendor is better in these regards... but "half-baked" still describes Microsoft's offerings. There's an awful lot of good features, and an awful lot of warts. It's absurd to pretend otherwise.
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Amazon's government cloud is regularly 1 to 2 years behind the public AWS in features. It really sucks to work with, as there's never any telling WHEN features that are standard in the outside world will become available. Amazon implements them on its own schedule, not the government's.
I'd much rather give Microsoft a chance. Even half-baked, or with the left hand not knowing what the right is up to, there's still no way Microsoft could do worse than Amazon.
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Um, I know it's popular to irrationally hate Microsoft
My hatred for Microsoft is dwarfed by my hatred for Oracle.
My lack of faith in the integrity of government procurement was slightly diminished when Oracle was the first to be eliminated.
from a unix oriented standpoint (Score:1)
it's pretty half baked engineering wise... whith fully baked molding and finish... panelling, chrome hubcaps... half baked engineering. Though it's gotten better as the whole industry did (not driven by them).
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Their interfaces are trash, their security is trash, their telemetry trashes their users' privacy. And this is the company we want at the heart of America's defenses? I will grant you it is company worthy of Trump: low brow and stupid, the World Wide Wrestling of a company that Trump still thinks is in sports.
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What Microsoft got sued by the FTC for is bread and butter for todays tech giants. Basically MS as the first large software company did not realize it had to pay lobbyists and share the wealth with DC. After the MS case all large Software companies have a lobbying budget and no one gets sued.
Heck I worked on a Salesforce project for one of the FANGs whose entire purpose was to track the number of meetings with representatives done by the companies Government Engagement group.
When your lobbying effort and bu
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It doesn't help that AWS also has half of all cloud computing market share to themselves. The last thing the world needs is yet another huge AWS customer eating up their excess capacity and driving up spot instance prices for everyone.
it's easy af (Score:1)
what're you talking about... there's plenty of reasons not to like Amazon, and Microsoft... and etc... but hard to use is a lame one.
rackspace (Score:1)
I stuck with rackspace until like 4 years ago when twice as expensive for half as powerful just didn't cut it anymore... AWS is compelling.
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They went with Oracle, not Microsoft.
That's false. [washingtonpost.com]
you can't run Oracle databases on Amazon or Microsoft clouds, they won't support it.
That's [amazon.com] false [microsoft.com].
Re:Inability to follow orders (Score:5, Insightful)
If they made the decision in a fair competitive bid process, it's all good. But, if James Mattis' claim that Trump ordered him to "screw Amazon" out of the contract is true and it had an effect on the decision, Amazon has a valid grievance.
If Trump and Mattis were put on the stand, Trump claimed that he didn't order that, and Mattis claimed he did, I know which one I'd believe as a juror. Amazon would be in good shape.
Re:Inability to follow orders (Score:5, Insightful)
The Pentagon is once more trying to walk back one of Trump's decisions
How is this a Trump decision in the first place? The President decides which cloud solution the Pentagon should use? Is Trump a cloud engineer now, too (in addition to being a drone engineer [globalnews.ca], an aircraft carrier catapult engineer [theatlantic.com], a renewable energy engineer [foxnews.com], a technology expert [mediaite.com], and an ISIS expert who knows more than the generals [washingtonpost.com])?
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Actually, it is illegal for Trump to meddle in government contracts, yet another item that should added to the impeachment bonfire.
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Actually, it is illegal for Trump to meddle in government contracts, yet another item that should added to the impeachment bonfire.
How so? Where is this enshrined in the law? Executive branch employees work for the President and he can issue executive orders to them. Clearly he can meddle as he has quite a bit of fiscal responsibility over government expenditures. Unless you have chapter and verse where the law clearly states that the president may not meddle in a contract negotiation then you are making claims which are false.
So, I look forward to your provision of two things.. 1. The law that you think was broken. 2. Evidence t
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Trump is not supposed to meddle but if the Pentagon is being corrupt he can ask them to redo the bidding process. Its the same with the Ukraine shit. Its OK for Biden to subvert democracy in Ukraine and put Nazis into power as long as they dont investigate his son but its not OK for Trump to ask the new govt to unblock the investigation stopped by the corrupt ex US Ambassador?
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Don't forget, also a wall engineer [thedailybeast.com]
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Fixed that for ya: The Pentagon is once more trying to walk back one of Trump's boneheaded and possibly illegal decisions. They want AWS so they will drag their feet on the Azure deal till Amazon gets a stay.
Business as usual (Score:3)
This is nothing surprising at all, except in the amount of attention it's getting.
Major contracts get challenged all the time, with or without merit. It's allowed, so it happens.
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Re:Business as usual (Score:4, Interesting)
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It doesn't just make the process unfair, Trump is supposed to be prevented by law from doing just what he did. But then it would be Barr that would have to agree to prosecute...fat chance of the law being followed in this case.
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What exactly did Trump do that was illegal? What law was broken?
There is a whole lot of stuff thrown out in the desperate attempts to sully Trump, most of it is made up of half truths and innuendo. Trump is no saint, but he's not the anti-christ either. He's actually trying to do the right thing.
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This is nothing surprising at all, except in the amount of attention it's getting.
Major contracts get challenged all the time, with or without merit. It's allowed, so it happens.
It happens because there is a chance that the protest will pay off and the contract may be stripped from the winner and given to you. You protest, you then get before a judge and though discovery get to sift through piles of documents and look for something, anything to get the contract re-evaluated and you get to make another bid. A protest lets you replay a game that you just lost.
$10 Billion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, I would file a complaint about something.
Doesn't matter what. I would find something.
But yes, the publicly elected official shouldn't have stuck his nose in the selection before announcement. If this was a municipal contract and it was a city council member sticking their nose in, the FBI would probably open an investigation. But since apparently the President is above the law and all morality and ethics now... Whatever.
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The FBI doesn't have jurisdiction over municipal contracts, idiot.
May I rewrite the headline? (Score:3, Funny)
"Wahhhh", said a spokesperson from Amazon, "Waaaaaaaaa waaaaaaa waaaaaaa, waaaaaaaa!"
He then proceeded to slump to the ground and simultaneously pound his fists and feet on the ground in protest.
Bill and Jeff are friends... (Score:1)
Let's face it: AWS is not going to fall apart over this contract, and Bill and Jeff would gladly help each other out. AWS has Windows and SQL Servers still, and it's unthinkable Bill would pull that over this rivalry. So, add a few bucks to MSFT and get AMZN down a few points from it's record highs... all is normal. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Government contracts (Score:3)
Is it just me, or does it seem like our government is being run like a business, where the managers of said business don't get along, and no one can fire each other, nor be fired?
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The government as a business is now reflecting the two-bit operation Trump and his sprogs are running. He ran it into the ground at least 6 times and declared bankruptcy thereby screwing his "investors" (gamblers). His tax giveaway resulted in FY 2019 budget being nearly $1 trillion in the red, next years will blow through that. And that's only the deficit. He and his Republican eunuchs will gladly run the U.S. in the ditch while servicing the debt will cost more than DoD next year. They promised that their
Why all or nothing? (Score:2)
Why doesn't the Pentagon demand or create cloud standards and then bid out specific project needs? Why does it have to be one big contract?
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AWS ready to answer for Captial One data breach? (Score:1)
If you read AWS marketing about their "cloud security," they make it sound like they thought of almost everything. Yet the criminal case against AWS employee Paige A. Thompson seems to indicate that AWS puts a lot of faith in each individual employee. The degree to which they have policies in place to perform a double check the actions of each employee's actions to catch a rogue before damage is done does not seem adequately in place.
If Amazon files a protest with the Government Accountability Office,
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