Pentagon Cancels $10 Billion JEDI Cloud Contract (cnbc.com) 80
The Department of Defense announced Tuesday it's calling off the $10 billion cloud contract that was the subject of a legal battle involving Amazon and Microsoft. From a report: The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most tangled contracts for the Department of Defense. In a press release Tuesday, the Pentagon said that "due to evolving requirements, increased cloud conversancy, and industry advances, the JEDI Cloud contract no longer meets its needs." But the fight over a cloud computing project does not appear to be completely over yet. The Pentagon said in the press release that it still needs enterprise-scale cloud capability and announced a new multi-vendor contract known as the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability. The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract, adding that they are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs. But, it added, it will continue to do market research to see if others could also meet its specifications. [...] The lucrative JEDI contract was intended to modernize the Pentagon's IT operations for services rendered over as many as 10 years. Microsoft was awarded the cloud computing contract in 2019, beating out market leader Amazon Web Services.
Good (Score:5, Interesting)
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Aka not putting all your eggs in one basket. The recent Cloudfare and Kaseya incidents were a reminder that this isn't just true for manufacturing.
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Of DoD's roughly $700 billion yearly budget, about half goes for employees, health care, etc. The usual stuff any enterprise must afford. Then there is plant and existing equipment, take another $100 billion. So we have $250 billion left over for research and acquisition. That's hardly out of control in the scheme of the overall budget, which is north of $4 trillion.
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So we have $250 billion left over for research and acquisition.
So... that's about enough for one F-35? :-)
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$250 billion is the ENTIRE military budget of China. And that's the only country that comes anywhere close to what the US spends. Next down the list is India with less than $80 billion.
Yes, it's fucking out of fucking control. That money could be FAR better spent on social programs.
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Yes, it's fucking out of fucking control. That money could be FAR better spent on social programs.
Or you could let the people keep their fucking money instead of letting politicians decide how it should be spent.
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Or you could let the people keep their fucking money instead of letting politicians decide how it should be spent.
That's a nice idea, America should have a party that does that. The current choice seems to be between spending it on education and health care and the occasional multicultural bathroom, or giving it to rich people/bombing places the average modern American can't find on a map.
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Re: Good (Score:2)
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Right, and that's why they restarted F-16 production, they have much lower operating costs
And to bomb a semi third world country back into the stone age: that is by far enough.
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Yup. That's how big projects worked in the past. We didn't go to the moon based upon a contract to a single company.
Part of the problem of contracting though, whether's it's the government or a private company, is that you really need to know enough about what it is you're after that you actually pick a competent contractor. Because on the other side all the contractors will all claim that they are experts in anything it is you ask them to do (which they often handle by subcontracting). And the contract
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Or sometimes, such as the JEDI contract, it's awarded based on which company a senile orangutan in the Oval Office is less jealous of.
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He doesn't have to, he has people around him who are competent to tell him where to go and what to do. Unfortunately the former guy still thinks he's IN the Oval Office, and doesn't have anyone around him with the ability to say, "Sir, you lost the election and are no longer in charge."
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MS and Amazon had roughly $50 billion each in cloud revenue in 2020. In the near future, DoD's purchasing power will mean squat. This has already happened in areas which are not cloud based. The regular economy dwarf DoD's spending. Hell, the rest of the budget dwarf's DoD spending.
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Even as they have $50 billion in revenue, they still desperately want to have $60 billion if the opportunity presents itself.
Unless you suggest that satisfying the demand of the contract would undermine their $50 billion, then yes, they would walk away to save their lock-in.
However, if they demand something that can be provided without risking ceding their near-monopoly status, then they will do so for a 'mere' 20% boost in revenue...
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Probably also their only hope to ever get a project off the ground. With their own bureaucracy and audit and legal challenges, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, and/or Amazon will all force delays if not chosen. If all 4 get some significant revenue, they may be less eager to try to torpedo each others bids (an economic mutually assured destruction scenario).
Besides, it blows the main selling point of 'cloud' sourcing. They are doing a huge, monolithic, long term procurement. If you do that, might as well do it on-pr
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On-premise is a non-starter in this case, they don't have the expertise nor the means to develop it, and no one is stupid enough any more to think they could successfully contract for it. Then there are the non-existent facilities, it takes literally years to put up the type of data centers they need, even if they use their own property and not site them where the various congresscritters want, and again they don't have the in-house expertise necessary. They have mainframes so old they're buying parts off
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The DOE regularly has 20,000 server deployments on-premise, with some of the highest energy and cooling densities out there. Sure, the government is chock full of dilapidated stuff in sections, but they do have facilities and scaling expertise on the hardware infrastructure side.
If this is a monolithic procurement that must encompass everything from virtual machines to access to office applications, then Microsoft is the only choice. But again, that's a questionable strategy as one monolithic procurement d
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The DOD should use their purchasing power to force interoperability
I don't even know what that would look like. There are too many fundamental differences between the two. Maybe you could write some sort of abstraction layer to sit between AWS/Azure and the DoD admins, but I'd bet on us getting back to the moon first. Now once you get above the AWS/Azure stack then yea, easy peasy. It will be on the DoD and whoever is building in the services that go on top of the environment to know both, and plan for both with their deployments. Things like standardized OS builds (with
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They technically did. The DoD was supposed to award JEDI to Amazon - the whole contract was basically "give Amazon AWS $10B".
Of course, Trump found WaPo wrote less than glowing articles about him, and since Bezos had acquired WaPo earlier, well, that was $10B that was NOT going to Amazon.
So the DoD had a call for quotes for AWS servi
Wounded. (Score:2)
The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract, adding that they are the only cloud service providers that can meet its needs. But, it added, it will continue to do market research to see if others could also meet its specifications.
ORACLE! :-D
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Re:Wounded. (Score:5, Insightful)
Oracle absolutely should be counted out. Of everything.
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Ya, but they are putzes. Never allow them into your organization unless your organization has a death wish.
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Plot twist: Google enters the game.
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Plot twist: Google enters the game.
DoD doesn't meet Google's standard of evil.
Oracle cloud so expensive (Score:2)
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If they were doing that then their level of reliability would be higher than it is.
I think (Score:2)
the govt will think twice about big contracts. However, the industry infighting is stupid.
They should just give the contract to Amazon now (Score:1)
DIY (Score:1)
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There are times when off the shelf products will suit the government's purposes. And the savings due to manufacturing volume can be passed to the customer. Assuming that customer doesn't turn around and tack on some weird requirement. But this isn't usually the case for all Pentagon acquisitions. Even if the item or service in question appears to be identical to a consumer or business grade instance, the question of whether it will work or can be supported while under attack by an adversary needs to be addr
WTF do they need a "cloud" provider?! (Score:3)
Why does everybody think they need a complex heavily distributed server farm, all proprietary and run by a 3rd party? Is it because the white fluffy "cloud" is so much cleaner in our minds than a bunch of internet servers held together by black box software which only works when continually online?
Server hardware and bandwidth is incredibly high compared to the days when we only had a few CDN available. They have the bunkers of servers, they don't need to spread them all over the private sector. As far a
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National defense was already heavily distributed in form. They don't have missile silos in one consolidated location either.
I don't think either the Amazon or Microsoft government cloud would exist in commercial datacenters. Rather, they would be using the same procedures but on Pentagon-owned hardware at Pentagon-controlled locations.
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Why does everybody think they need a complex heavily distributed server farm, all proprietary and run by a 3rd party? Is it because the white fluffy "cloud" is so much cleaner in our minds than a bunch of internet servers held together by black box software which only works when continually online?
JFYI, Amazon already operates a "cloud" for the CIA. It's entirely sectioned off the public Internet, people with guns guard all the SCIFs that provide access to it.
The reason for the "cloud" is the same, it's cheaper to share resources based on actual current demand rather than have each team over-provision their servers and then manage them separately.
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If people want a comparison, think
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If critical Amazon or Microsoft data centers are disabled
Then it won't affect the Pentagon cloud at all. Theoretically, they would be handling a private cloud at undisclosed locations using their own technologies. At least I sure hope that would be the plan.
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Why not do it themselves? It'd be so much cheaper in the long run. This applies to all government spending.
Seems to be some confusion. The DoD is part of the US Government. I'm pretty sure there is actually a law that prevents the phrases "Do it themselves" and "cheaper", and derivatives thereof, from appearing in the same government document, much less the same sentence.
Military Industral Complex (Score:4, Interesting)
20 years ago or so, I was a consultant bidding on a job to do some a small Crystal Report for a local Fire Department. It was for payroll calculating how much vacation time each fireman had collected and built up.
The Fire Chief told us that this is a very serious report, because it is a fire department and lives are on the line. By taking that attitude the quote went up 20% because it meant that the department wouldn't be happy with an iterative approach to it, where we will do a few tweaks if we found something wrong. But wanted it working 100% correct after release. Which will mean we would need extremely detailed specs, and not fill in the gaps with any intuition.
The Military and Medical field also have this attitude. Where they are not tolerant towards mistakes, but also will rush to get things done.
I strongly expect that the Pentagon didn't really know what to do with this JEDI Project, gave out some broad specs, only to find what they are asking for is going to be expensive and not as useful as they envisioned in their heads. And what I not as strongly expect, was Microsoft going to the Pentagon and suggesting the idea to use such technologies in a particular way. Hence why I think in Part Amazon was cut off the bidding contract because it really was wanted to go to Microsoft.
The Government bidding method is full of loopholes and room for undocumented corruption. If the government agency wanted me as a consultant to work on their Website in C# and Javascript. They would have picked up my resume, that I may have sent for a previous job, and when they make the bid, they will add some things that is unique to my Resume, SQL Server, FORTRAN, Unix in addition, where they could get away with it, because it may be replacing an existing FORTRAN app on an old Unix system, and will need SQL interaction too.
Re:Military Industral Complex (Score:5, Insightful)
Having looked at the specs, while they are somewhat broad; it was chiefly along the lines of "give us a price for storage, computer, security" etc. Amazon and Microsoft both had or almost had Secret / TS sanctioned offerings, so it came down to lifecycle costs. Microsoft threw in the deep discount on Microsoft licenses, discounted O365 transitions, etc that Amazon couldn't really compete on. All this IMHO of course, as the deal got mired in the mango man/bezos fight so who knows what else went on. The RFP / specs are public, and you can kind of fill in the blanks if you've worked with msoft/amazon before.
Re:Military Industral Complex (Score:5, Funny)
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Next day delivery on Amazon Choice intercontinental ballistic missiles.
2 out of 5 stars.
Pros: Was able to turn the entire territory into glass causing fear among people within 500 miles of where it landed.
Cons: Barely made it over the next border and landed on a school.
Would not buy again.
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The Government bidding method is full of loopholes and room for undocumented corruption.
You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy.
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Also, the rank and file run into MS everyday, not usually in a good way but suffer from Stockholm Syndrome. So the honchos who know little but make big decisions could understand what MS was offering (they couched it in terms of their existing malware), they had a hard time understanding what Amazon was offering. It isn't as though the competent techno-geeks were making the decisions.
WTF Are They Thinking Anyway??? (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree. Given the broad base of attacks including supply-chain attacks underway, using third party cloud for your military instead of building your own hardened, NSA-secured infrastructure is fucking insane.
I would bet real money that whatever cloud solution they use is penetrated by an APT with significant loss of life. Unfortunately, the reality of the broad attack surface of US infrastructure is still not apparent to those dolts in the military. They think they can buy an off-the-she
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If the government thinks distributed computing centres is the way to go, build their own.
I agree wholeheartedly. The realities of the challenges to this approach probably influenced the decision, however.
Cloud storage is considered a service more than it is considered a product. The DoD could define the contract as the purchase of a product, but then they'd be forced to do their own continued maintenance. DoD requirements for working on these kind of products is high - the DoD struggles terribly hard to find IT professionals that want to subjugate themselves to the terms of obtaining and mainta
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After all the cloud based security breaches in the past year, what is it it about "somebody else's computer" that doesn't fucking compute for these idiots. You're going to put systems that should be highly secure... where????
Amazon already operates entirely isolated clouds for the CIA, rated up to Top Secret classification. These clouds are designed in such a way, that information can only go in, not out. All the maintenance is done by cleared personnel, inside SCIFs.
If the government thinks distributed computing centres is the way to go, build their own.
That's what they are doing. They are just contracting it out to Amazon.
About goddamn time (Score:1)
Microsoft winning this contract was untenable. Substandard engineering is not what you want backing your warfighters. I could easily see lives being lost due to infrastructure running godawful code put together by the same incompetents who have turned Windows 10 updates into such a clusterfuck.
Amazon - at least - has a veneer of competence. I also wonder why Google wasn't considered. What aspect of cloud infrastructure are they unable to supply?
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Google deliberately dropped out because they didn't want to compromise on their morals and work on a military solution. Or atleast, thats what they said.
Its somewhat pointless us guessing at what made AWS a better / worse solution than Microsoft. These deals are incredibly complex and there would have been teams of people at each vendor who would have worked on making sure that their solutions fit the RFP (which itself would have been a very complex requirements document). There are so many variables in how
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fixing the grammar:
There are so many variables in how the requirements are interpreted, solutioned, and priced...
I guess the empire struck back? (Score:2)
No fear, the JEDI will return.
History repeats itself! (Score:1)
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I'm assuming this is part of your tight five.
This is not the contract you are looking for? (Score:2)
Canceled because ... (Score:3)
Meaning... Either:
(a) The vendor they wanted won the contract, but would probably lose on appeal.
(b) The vendor they wanted lost the contract and probably wouldn't win on appeal.
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because the cloud is for idiot losers, and DOD have finally woken up!
Vader, the negotiator (Score:2)
Trump killed JEDI (Score:2, Insightful)
The foundation of Amazon's case is that Trump had publicly expressed opposition to Amazon because of his disdain for Jeff Bezos. Given that Trump went so far as to modify a NOAA hurricane trajectory forecast with a Sharpie and his pride in suing people just because he can, it is reasonable to expect that the public statements accurately reflected actions he took off the record as President.
Does this mean that Amazon was cheated? No, but Trump gave Amazon so much ammunition that the Pentagon sees resetting t
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In other words, Trump forgot the most important part of being a president:
That it's an inherently political job and you can't run a country as a president the same way you run a corporation as a CEO.
Re: Trump killed JEDI (Score:2)
All true, except heâ(TM)s a very lost Ceo, too! A CEO with any competence would not jeopardize a deal by blathering publicly. This is why you almost never hear Tim Cook talking about any acquisitions. Public finds out after the fact, and he talks about how great the company is. Even a CEO position demands tact and diplomacy.
America, the country, that makes no sense (Score:2)
The agency said it plans to solicit proposals from both Amazon and Microsoft for the contract,
Bollocks.
What about the other big names? Apple? Facebook? Telekom? Google? CloudFlare?
I bet there are hundreds if not thousands of regional ISPs that can easily set up a part of the cloud. You want it decentralized anyway, or not?
Germany has probably 100 ...
Remember when... (Score:1)