Amazon's Cloud Business Giving Federal Agencies Up To $1 Billion In Discounts (cnbc.com) 20
Amazon Web Services has struck a deal with the U.S. government to provide up to $1 billion in cloud service discounts through 2028. CNBC reports: The agreement is expected to speed up migration to the cloud, as well as adoption of artificial intelligence tools, the General Services Administration said. "AWS's partnership with GSA demonstrates a shared public-private commitment to enhancing America's AI leadership," the agency said in a release.
Amazon's cloud boss, Matt Garman, hailed the agreement as a "significant milestone in the large-scale digital transformation of government services." The discounts aggregated across federal agencies include credits to use AWS' cloud infrastructure, modernization programs and training services, as well as incentives for "direct partnership." Further reading: OpenAI Offers ChatGPT To US Federal Agencies for $1 a Year
Amazon's cloud boss, Matt Garman, hailed the agreement as a "significant milestone in the large-scale digital transformation of government services." The discounts aggregated across federal agencies include credits to use AWS' cloud infrastructure, modernization programs and training services, as well as incentives for "direct partnership." Further reading: OpenAI Offers ChatGPT To US Federal Agencies for $1 a Year
Kowtow (Score:3, Informative)
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Re:Kowtow (Score:4, Funny)
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If it is their FedRamp data centers then it was already part of the plan, but if it is the public stuff they're offering then it isn't really fit to use.
From what I see, it's a big announcement but not a whole lot of change; I suspect as you do that it only involves FedRamp due to Federal security requirements. As for AWS, this could also be the tech equivalent of the drug dealer giving you your first hit for free. Once agencies are tied tightly to AWS it will be harder for competitors to gain traction, and after 2028 AWS can start raising prices as a result.
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First hit is free, like IBM.
AFAIK, IBM discounts nearly all licenses to the Feds. They focus on the license revenue after design and implementation, and leave all that tricky sustainment and user training/change to a prime contractor.
Question is if AWS wants to use that model, or do the consulting as well.
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AWS is offering a discount, not free. The equivalent is a drug dealer saying "I'll sell you this $50 bag of dope for $40"
Yea, and TFA didn't have details on the discount. It seems like a move to grab at a chance to lock in the feds on AWS. The big playersa re making moves to stifle competition. Oracle and OpenAI made similars move with chatGPT:
The GSA announced a similar deal last month with cloud rival Oracle . The agency also reached an agreement with OpenAI on Wednesday that will give federal agencies access to ChatGPT for $1 through the next year.
Re: Kowtow (Score:2)
It was hard. With AI, migrating away from aws is easy. :-)
The issue is deeper than you think (Score:2)
July 27, 1998 FORT MEADE, Maryland (IDG) -- Back in the days of the cold war, Washington insiders used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency." The government denied the very existence of this group, which is dedicated to intercepting and decoding foreign communications. That was then. Today the National Security Agency is well known, and spends a lot of time leaning on software, switch and router vendors, pushing them to re-tool their products. The agency's goal: to ensure that the government has access to encrypted data.
The industry is facing a year-end deadline to add a government-approved back door into network gear. Vendors that don't provide this access risk losing export privileges.
Cruising up and down Silicon Valley, NSA spooks from the agency's Fort Meade headquarters have been making pit stops at companies ranging from industry leaders Netscape Communications Corp. and Sun Microsystems, Inc. to start-ups such as VPNet Technologies, Inc. in order to get a peek at products still on the drawing board.
The NSA wants software vendors to make sure that any product with strong encryption have some way for the government to tap into the data. And because practically every commercial network application, router or switch these days includes encryption or an option for it, almost every vendor now has to answer to the NSA if it wants to export.
It's gotten to the point where no vendor hip to the NSA's power will even start building products without checking in with Fort Meade first. This includes even that supposed ruler of the software universe, Microsoft Corp. "It's inevitable that you design products with specific [encryption] algorithms and key lengths in mind," said Ira Rubenstein, Microsoft attorney and a top lieutenant to Bill Gates. By his own account, Rubenstein acts as a "filter" between the NSA and Microsoft's design teams in Redmond, Wash. "Any time that you're developing a new product, you will be working closely with the NSA," he noted.
When it comes to encryption, it's widely known that a 40-bit encryption key is easily breakable and hence rather useless. Until not long ago, this is what the U.S. government allowed for the export of software. But the Clinton administration a year and a half ago said it would allow the export of products with stronger encryption keys by any vendor that agreed to add a "key-recovery" feature to its products by year-end - giving the government access to encrypted data without the end user's knowledge. https://archive.is/yasds#selec... [archive.is]
That was around the same time when the govt seed funded Google.
Seed-funded by the NSA and CIA, Google was merely the first among a plethora of private sector start-ups co-opted by US intelligence to retain ‘information superiority.’ The origins of this ingenious strategy trace back to a secret Pentagon-sponsored group, that for the last two decades has functioned as a bridge between the US government and elites across the business, industry, finance, corporate, and media sectors.
In 1994 — the same year the Highlands Forum was founded under the stewardship of the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the ONA, and DARPA — two young PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, made their breakthrough on the first automated web crawling and page ranking application. That application remains the core component of what eventually became Google’s search service. Brin and Page had performed their work with funding from the Digital Library Initiative (DLI), a multi-agency programme of the National Science Foundation (NSF), NASA and DARPA.
But that’s just one side of the story. Throughout the development of the search engine, Sergey Brin reported regularly and directly to two people who were not Stanford faculty at all: Dr. Bhavani Thuraisingham and Dr. Rick Steinheiser. Both were representatives of a sensitive US intelligence community research programme on information security and data-mining.
Thuraisingham is currently the Louis A. Beecherl distinguished professor and executive director of the Cyber Security Research Institute at the University of Texas, Dallas, and a sought-after expert on data-mining, data management and information security issues. But in the 1990s, she worked for the MITRE Corp., a leading US defense contractor, where she managed the Massive Digital Data Systems initiative, a project sponsored by the NSA, CIA, and the Director of Central Intelligence, to foster innovative research in information technology.
In an extraordinary document hosted by the website of the University of Texas, Thuraisingham recounts that from 1993 to 1999, “the Intelligence Community [IC] started a program called Massive Digital Data Systems (MDDS) that I was managing for the Intelligence Community when I was at the MITRE Corporation.” The program funded 15 research efforts at various universities, including Stanford. Its goal was developing “data management technologies to manage several terabytes to petabytes of data,” including for “query processing, transaction management, metadata management, storage management, and data integration.” https://medium.com/insurge-int... [medium.com]
Re: Kowtow (Score:2)
Some bootlickers with mod points today. Good job, you've wasted your time on censorship instead of boosting good posts or helping to filter out truly off topic and offensive posts.
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Also, note that there are other defining characteristics of Fascism, and displaying one is meaningless. Corporatism (Fascism's structure for controlling private business) is popular in Europe, but Fascism is not. Corporatism is not popular in the US. The closest we get is when there's a Federal arbitrator involved with large labor negotiations.
The key characteristic of Fascism
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Apple made a 24ct gold statue for Trump. That really should tell you all you need to know.
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AWS probably needs to take some pretty drastic steps to inflate their user numbers at this point. Microsoft Azure is starting to eat away at their business, and the recent layoffs are having a serious impact on their customer support. I'm getting to the point where I don't even bother opening AWS support tickets at this point, because the canned responses that I'm getting back are useless. I could have got back better answers asking ChatGPT.
Sounds familiar (Score:1)
1. Raise the prices by $2b
2. Offer $1b "discount"
3. Profit
It's all about training the AIs (Score:2)
Cloud costs will approach zero, subsidized by the hunger for AI training data.
Privacy protection? [Waves hands] Sure, we'll keep your data 'private'.