Amazon Hints At Details On Its CIA Franken-Cloud 67
coondoggie writes "Amazon Web Services recently won a reported $600 million contract to build the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) a cloud. But that cloud will not look like any other cloud on the planet. Amazon will build the cloud using AWS architectures and AWS will manage it, but executives hinted that it will not be accessed the way other customers use AWS services through the public Internet. 'We're managing the operations in the data center,' Andy Jassy, Amazon's senior vice president and the head of the company's cloud computing division AWS said about the CIA deal. 'It's our hardware, it's our networking.'"
It's Ours? (Score:2, Insightful)
'It's our hardware, it's our networking.'"
Until they tell us it's not.
Re:So... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not really "ze cloud" then, right? Fuck, I'm tired of hearing that word.
'Cloud' is a pretty nebulous term. Like it or loath it (the latter being the correct answer), it is definitely sometimes applied to purely internal arrangements, if the internal infrastructure has been sufficiently abstracted in a manner similar to that used by one of the external 'cloud' services.
The trivial case would be an internal Eucalyptus [eucalyptus.com] implementation, where the entire point is to be wholly compatible with a public cloud provider, either for code reuse or for expansion options. Where exactly the dividing line between something like this, and 'yeah, sure, the devs probably all have a copy of VMware Workstation. Why?' is a matter for largely fruitless debate.
worthless read (Score:5, Insightful)
AWS is building the CIA a massive private cloud that will run AWS infrastructure, but it will sit in a CIA data center.
there, that's the entire article in one sentence.
Re:It's Ours? (Score:5, Insightful)
Until they tell us it's not.
Couldn't have said it better myself...
Unless Amazon plans to hire its own paramilitary force to provide security at its data centers and is willing to fight anyone who tries to show up and "take over" (and blow it up if they cannot prevent the take over), then it is just hot air.
When the guys with the guns show up, your rights start and stop there.
Way too many people sitting behind their keyboards/tablets/smartphones seem to forget that point.