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Cloud Microsoft The Military

Microsoft's $10 Billion Pentagon Deal at Risk Amid Amazon Fight (bloomberg.com) 58

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
Microsoft is in danger of losing a contract to provide $10 billion of cloud computing services to the Pentagon, a deal the government has threatened to scrap altogether after years of legal squabbling. From a report: The U.S. Defense Department said it will reconsider the controversial procurement if a federal judge declines to dismiss Amazon's allegations that former President Donald Trump's meddling cost the company the winner-take-all contract. That means the fate of a cloud project the Pentagon considers critical for its war fighters may rest in the hands of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, which could soon issue a ruling on Amazon's accusations. The Pentagon said last month it would take too long to prove in court that its decision to award Microsoft the lucrative cloud deal wasn't unduly influenced by the White House. If the judge allows Amazon to argue its bias claims in the case, the government may decide to stop fighting.

"If the court denies the government's motion we will most likely be facing an even longer litigation process," Pentagon spokesman John Kirby said at a press conference late last month. "The DOD Chief Information Officer will reassess the strategy going forward." The warning is another twist in a contentious process that has involved years of legal challenges, behind-the-scenes lobbying and a public relations campaign by technology rivals to unseat Amazon as the original front-runner for the cloud contract when it was unveiled in 2018. More than a year after Microsoft was named the winner, the Defense Department is still fighting to execute the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud -- or JEDI, an acronym intended to evoke "Star Wars" imagery -- to serve as the primary data repository for military services worldwide. The deal is worth $10 billion over a decade. There are signs the Pentagon is already moving on. The Defense Department is talking up its other cloud contracts beyond JEDI, and some of the program's biggest cheerleaders have left the department, leaving new leaders to make decisions on a procurement they inherited from the Trump administration. Even Microsoft executives are trumpeting all the other work the company plans to keep doing for the Defense Department, in the event that its image-boosting JEDI deal goes south.
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Microsoft's $10 Billion Pentagon Deal at Risk Amid Amazon Fight More

Microsoft's $10 Billion Pentagon Deal at Risk Amid Amazon Fight

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  • Pay 10 billion dollars (Score:5, Insightful)

    by bazmail ( 764941 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @10:41AM (#61126992)
    to put the nations secrets on someone else computers. Hmmm

    • Microsoft and Amazon apply for welfare. Don't they deserve a safety net? Haven't you ever heard of too big to fail? But don't call the DOD, the largest budget item, corporate welfare - it's "defense spending".

    • to put the nations secrets on someone else computers. Hmmm

      We've seen how the government takes care of its own computers.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by cusco ( 717999 )

        My co-irker's previous position was Azure network support. When I first told him about the JEDI contract his first words were, "They're going to regret that." When I asked whether he meant the Pentagon or Microsoft he said, "Both."

        Later we were talking about it and he said their government cloud network when he was there was held together with "duct tape and prayer".

        • My co-irker's previous position was Azure network support. When I first told him about the JEDI contract his first words were, "They're going to regret that." When I asked whether he meant the Pentagon or Microsoft he said, "Both."

          Later we were talking about it and he said their government cloud network when he was there was held together with "duct tape and prayer".

          Yeah, I"ve had experience trying to work on the gov side of the Azure cloud.

          We had to move multiple data centers to Azure. I dunno who m

          • I've worked the AWS side of this (govcloud and others).

            It went about as smoothly as commercial AWS does. Images were mostly easy to import, if you happened to not want something that was in the giant list of available AMIs. Tools worked as expected if you used the AWS version, or if you didn't use the AWS version.

            Though this was all Linux. I have no idea if it's hard to do Windows.

            Only down sides was govcloud is a few versions behind commercial AWS.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Salgak1 ( 20136 )

      Long since done. Ever hear of "C2S" Amazon Web Services run the CIA Cloud. . . [washingtontechnology.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by wiredog ( 43288 )

      That's one of the more idiotic uninformed takes I've seen.

      The DoD and other agencies already have AWS on the classified side. It's on SIPRNet and other classified networks.

    • Amazon and Microsoft both have extensive, sophisticated, scalable cloud infrastructures that they've spent years developing. Can you imagine what it would cost the taxpayers for the Pentagon to develop their own? 10 years from now it would still be under development and grotesquely over budget.

      It brings to mind an old joke:

      Q: What is the definition of an elephant?

      A: A mouse built to government specifications.

    • You realize the government has been doing this ever since there's been computers for the government to put their data on, right?

      A contractor runs the datacenter, even the ones in DoD facilities.

  • Hopefully someone told the biz teams at both companies to read up on Game Theory. Because this is exactly the sort of equilibrium thatâ(TM)s not optimal for either of them. But lawyers will lawyer.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jack9 ( 11421 )

      > Because this is exactly the sort of equilibrium thatâ(TM)s not optimal for either of them.

      Explain this?

      There is only 1 resource that guarantees pork and infinite work in perpetuity. This is not a fight about who's first or even more successful in the market. This is a fight about who will be the last one in the market. There is no equilibrium in a last-over-the-finish-line race.

      • Taking the threat to withdraw from the contract at face value, you then have a scenario in which neither competitor gets a contract because both were fighting tooth and nail to get the contract. "last-over-the-finish-line race" is in fact THE prisoner's dilemma.

        • No, because the prisoner's dilemma involves having 3 states for each prisoner: good, mediocre and bad. This only has two: fantastic and bad.

    • Not really. The prisoners' dilemma applies when there's a level playing field with everything outside the dilemma being equal between the prisoners.

      In this case, the former warden had decided to harbor a great deal of personal animosity towards one of the prisoners, whose "offense" was made up by that former warden from whole cloth. And even if that former warden may not have personally and directly given orders as to which prisoner would be consigned to the hole and which would go free; he was definitely

  • Yup, it's a cloud (Score:3)

    by Errol backfiring ( 1280012 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @11:00AM (#61127062) Journal
    Well, that is the thing with clouds. Before you know it, it is gone with the wind.
  • Think of the time of money that would be saved if they only flipped a coin.

  • This is like three street kids fighting over a gold bar. The problem is the contract is so lucrative that people will do anything to get it. If you win a contract, you win a contract. But there is so much at stake it's worth pouring in a few million in legal fees to stop the other company from getting it.

  • From a previous (and above-linked) Slashdot article:-

    "Known as Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI), the contract will provide the Pentagon with cloud services for basic storage and power all the way up to artificial intelligence processing, machine learning, and the ability to process mission-critical workloads."

    There are entirely valid reasons for making an investment in public cloud solutions:-

    1. Because your organization doesn't have the capital to make an up-front investment in a mas

    • Re:Back to Basics... (Score:4, Informative)

      by cusco ( 717999 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `ybxib.nairb'> on Friday March 05, 2021 @12:08PM (#61127344)

      The Pentagram has a bunch of mainframe computers that are so old they're buying parts on eBay. They also have exabytes of GIS data they desperately need to move off antiquated and unreliable tape libraries before they fail. Microsoft is the best at managing herds of VMs, but this isn't the workload that is needed here. Amazon has the staff, experience, and procedures to migrate the types of systems that they need to move, Microsoft will have to develop them.

      Amazon has the high speed network links throughout the world (better than the military's in most cases). Microsoft will need to acquire them and build out the infrastructure, and their network staff is already overwhelmed.

      AWS has the certifications and procedures to store and manage the highest classification of data already (which is why they have the CIA and IRS contracts), the last I knew Microsoft's certifications were still provisional.

      Amazon has their Snowmobile (a project that I worked on!) to migrate exabytes of data, Microsoft thinks you can put a couple of SANs in a Ryder truck (hint: it doesn't work).

      I've worked designing and configuring physical security for both cloud systems, and AWS's standards and procedures are far stricter. I've worked with the MS Global Security Operations Center and in the AWS SOC. The former is an average large corporate SOC, and Azure data centers are just another group of alarms. The latter is dedicated specifically to the AWS data centers and is the second best security operations center that I've ever dealt with (the first monitored the Gates properties).

      By and large my own opinion is that the contract was awarded to the wrong company. Admittedly I'm biased, since I work at Amazon and formerly in AWS, but I don't see any reason other than political interference (and possible Pentagram corruption) for the contract to have gone to Azure.

      • Microsoft thinks you can put a couple of SANs in a Ryder truck (hint: it doesn't work).

        Can you elaborate a bit for those of us not in the exabyte business? On the surface I can see that it'd need encryption and key management, lots of filer heads to provide enough ingest rate, and some complications with power and cooling. Those seem like problems I could solve in a few months with a fat budget and a small team of sysadmins, coders, electricians, HVAC, etc, but I know that's just the Dunning-Kruger effect. Can you give us a rough idea of how hard this really is?

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by cusco ( 717999 )

          My part was comparatively simple, I did the physical security (a rather fun project). I know that there were attempts before the Snowmobile that were less than successful, including one where the SANs were taken out of the truck and plugged directly into the network backbone (the SAN didn't survive the shaking of the transit).

          I do know that implementing the AWS file permission and encryption system on the Snowmobile drives was a major concern, the entire truck could be stolen and the thieves would have not

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kenh ( 9056 )

      You forgot one - lower cost.

      Outsourcing an activity to a third-party that are experts in given area and can leverage their scale to lower costs is an activity common in business.

      It is easy to believe that outsourcing that level of data warehousing to an Amazon or a Microsoft would ultimately be cheaper than having the DOD build their own redundant, geographically diverse, data warehouse infrastructure and managing it with government employees.

      Do you truly believe the federal government could build, staff,

    • None of the above [feel free to add any I've missed that you think are applicable] apply to the Pentagon

      2 and 3 directly apply to the Pentagon.

      The Pentagon doesn't need to care about coping with peaks-in-demand: they are the origin of the motto: "Why have one when you can have two at twice the price?"

      That works when you're something like the F35 contract. But there's 10s of thousands of contracts that are not the size of the F35 contract, where buying even one good-sized server is a significant amount of the contract. And that doesn't even get to the problems of finding a place to rack that server.

      What's the business driver?

      To make it so every piddly contract doesn't have to buy it's own server, and then find a place to house and maintain that server forever.

      How come an external third party can do a better job?

      Because they've already develop

  • Once you start down the path to the Cloud, forever will your adversary have your data Pawn you they will.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      So far AWS has never been hacked from outside. From inside the data storage system is designed so that absolutely no one has access to customer data no matter what their permissions level is. I don't understand myself how the system works, but a large group of people much smarter than myself designed and implemented it, and both the CIA and IRS are confident that it actually does work as designed (which is why they have those contracts).

  • Translation (Score:4, Informative)

    by jmccue ( 834797 ) on Friday March 05, 2021 @11:32AM (#61127182) Homepage

    The Pentagon said last month it would take too long to prove in court that its decision to award Microsoft Corp. the lucrative cloud deal wasn't unduly influenced by the White House.

    Translation: Since we cannot redact our documents for a court case, we are unable to spin how Microsoft was selected without embarrassing some politicians

    But I thought they wanted to choose AWS originally, I guess we need a scorecard to keep this straight. In any case they are correct in saying this case will be very complex and will take years to sort out

  • Simple solution (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Simple solution: CEO death match. Two CEOs enter, only one leaves (clutching the precious^W contract).

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      I'll put $1000 down on Bezos over Nadella. $100 if they delay until Jassy takes over.

  • As this article shows [reclaimthenet.org], Amazon employs a staggering number of former high officials from every major department and agency. They are playing the beltway bandit game hardcore. Tons of people leave to get jobs at Amazon that pay really well and then go back to work in government, usually to benefit Democratic politicians.

    What Trump called out was the fact that this pattern was in play at DoD when JEDI was written. The revolving door was swinging good and hard during that time period at DoD and Amazon....

    And hi

    • And hilariously enough, Microsoft still beat them fair and square

      Not even close. Azure does not currently meet the requirements for the JEDI contract. MS promised to meet them during the contract. AWS already meets the requirements of the contract.

      To their credit, MS is pouring money into Azure that could cause them to meet the requirements in a year or two...but that still doesn't change Azure wasn't ready when they won the contract.

      Also:

      usually to benefit Democratic politicians.

      I'd love to hear how, specifically, this works in your mind.

  • It may be time time to step in with a decent compromise executive order because the squabbling hurts our military. Maybe give the main network to MS, but promise to involve Amazon in side projects that are relatively independent.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cusco ( 717999 )

      Backwards, I think. Microsoft's network is a teetering tower of kluges, I've seen more DNS outages than you could shake a stick at and replication storms lasting days when I've been there.

  • Are they crazy? Or just stupid?
  • Use both and be able to migrate data and processes to either. In the future they may want to migrate to yet other clouds as new vendors appear and old ones become mismanaged. The DOD should be looking beyond a five or ten year timeline.

  • a cloud project the Pentagon considers critical for its war fighters

    An item which is critical?

    Let me guess - someone is going to make a lot of claims about it being unhackable, Real Soon Now. Which would mean that it has already been hacked, comprehensively, by American TLAs, and every major non-American TLA on the planet.

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