I thought Trump doesn’t like Microsoft anymore? Didn’t he want to block them from buying TikTok and would instead prefer Oracle as the acquirer? Anyway I can’t keep up. It’s all changing faster than middle school friendships.
It appears as though Amazon likely helped to write the requirements, such that they would be selected. If you write a strict and tailored set of requirements, you can basically select the contractor/product before you even put out the RFP (request for proposal); this is relatively common.
Taibbi, Matt (25 February 2019). "This Battle of Billionaires Was Inevitable". Rolling Stone. Retrieved 25 February 2019. "This started as a lawsuit filed by would-be bid competitor Oracle, whose co-CEO, Safra Catz, is reportedly one of Trump's biggest supporters in Silicon Valley. The suit suggested Pentagon procurement officer Deap Ubhi's involvement in the JEDI negotiations constituted a conflict. Ubhi used to work for Amazon and in 2017 tweeted, "Once an Amazonian, always an Amazonian.""
Is there anything beyond the appearance of impropriety, is there anything technical in the RFP that strongly suggests either direct or indirect influence from AWS? (I ask this in all sincerity).
I'd be interested in the original source on the allegation that AWS influenced requirements in such a way that they were the front runner to be selected; but nonetheless it is what has been alleged, not as sure that it "appears" that way without an original source.
>There is a recurring pattern to the way President Trump behaves when he’s called out for doing something egregious: first he denies doing it, then he looks for ways to push it off to the side, to distract attention from it and delay efforts to investigate it (so people get bored and forget about it).
Regardless of what you think about Amazon, this sentence alone is incredible.
It doesn't matter to them who wins the next election. If Trump stays in office they aren't getting contracts anyway, because of Jeff Bezos and his ownership of the WaPo.
Or quite sure of the President’s preexisting animus and corruption, such that worrying about alienating the administration is pointless as that’s already immutably maxed out with maximum retaliation programmed in, and only replacement of the executive or outside (e.g., judicial) constraint on the executive can get the results they want.
The comment said that sentence alone is incredible. I didn’t realize it meant just for a corporate press release. It also isn’t that big of a deal when Amazon likely would not have said that if they had gotten the JEDI contract. But they are on the offensive against the administration so they aren’t even saying this out of pure knowledge. But as part of their own strategy.
I don’t see it being special in any circumstance for those reasons
I’m curious why people are downvoting the comment. It is quite remarkable for a major corporation to call the President out so explicitly. This is a scorched-earth approach to the comparatively anodyne world of public messaging around government contracting. Perhaps it’s a bet that the government changes hands in November and this kind of post curries favor with the new administration.
So what exactly is Amazon claiming? That Microsoft didn't actually meet the RFP conditions? That Microsoft was given the contract despite a higher price? That Amazon should have been granted the contract despite a higher price and both providers meeting the requirements, since AWS deserves it due to some unquantifiable market leader je ne sais quoi?
This reflects poorly on Amazon. Contesting the initial award is one thing. Continuing their protests after a year of legal proceedings ended in favor of their competitor demonstrates a sense of entitlement.
I disagree completely. This is how you fight corruption. You don't just throw up your hands and say "welp the system is rigged, guess we will give up". Would you say the same thing in a civil rights case? Should we just give up all anti-racism efforts because "well we've already tried for a year but didn't make any progress"? Do you think it also reflects poorly on the ACLU or EFF for continuing their fights even after years of unproductive legal proceedings?
If the process is corrupt (and based on all public knowledge of JEDI, it absolutely seems like the award was given based on Trump's personal idealogies) then I believe it reflects extremely positively on Amazon to finally stand up to this type of bullshit, rather than rolling over and saying "well that's just how govt contracting is".
What are you talking about? AWS has an absurd amount of government contracts, JEDI notwithstanding. A quick Google estimates that ~20% of AWS revenue comes from govcloud, and I don't think that even includes the secret contracts AWS supposedly has with the three letter agencies.
There's a lot of non-DoD (and even non-federal-government) customers, some very large, with federal data with FedRamp constraints (some of which require govcloud, some on FedRamp certified commercial offerings); Amazon isn't going to dump all of them even if their litigation over JEDI eventually fails.
That said, they seemed on the road to win before the do over caused the lawsuit to be put on hold, so unless DoD provably really did do it right this time, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up winning and all the do over does is delay that win.
> Contesting the initial award is one thing. Continuing their protests after a year of legal proceedings ended in favor of their competitor demonstrates a sense of entitlement.
The legal proceedings did not end in favor of their competitor, they were put on hold because DoD short-circuited the legal proceedings—which were going well for Amazon—by deciding to void the initial decision and do a do-over (in which, Amazon alleges, they simply repeated the violations for which they were challenged the first time).
Amazon is claiming that Microsoft did not meet the requirements:
> In February, the Court of Federal Claims stopped performance on JEDI. The Court determined AWS’s protest had merit, and that Microsoft’s proposal likely failed to meet a key solicitation requirement and was likely deficient and ineligible for award. Our protest detailed how pervasive these errors were (impacting all six technical evaluation factors), and the Judge stopped the DoD from moving forward because the very first issue she reviewed demonstrated serious flaws.
This is hilarious.
Amazon: "How can you choose MICROSOFT?! We're the best"
DoD: "Uh, sure, but we like Microsoft."
Zon: "BUT WE'RE THE BEST. DONT YOU UNDERSTAND"
DoD: "Uh, no"
Zon: "BUT, BUT, BUT THAT'S NOT FAIR"
DoD: "Tough."
Choosing a contractor out of personal preference of the president is why the laws around federal bidding were created in the first place - contracts paid by taxpayers are intended to be based on the merit of the bid.
Not exactly, women/minority owned companies are often explicitly favored in the bidding process. It really depends though, as different government agencies have different priorities and criteria.
You're absolutely correct that the outcome is quite transparently wildly inequitable. I think it's possible that it could be the case that both assertions could be correct at the same time.
Your updated comment is much less untrue, though the GAO reports widespread fraud in the procurement processes for these minority, veteran, and women owned businesses as described in the above link.
Well it's not that hilarious, you would hope that the DoD actually does have some kind of justification than "uh no" and "tough" about how its spending 10 billion dollars.
this is a really silly post for two reasons. First Amazon actually makes a fairly specific case, namely that they would have been cheaper by a fairly significant margin.
Secondly I very much hope government procurement to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars follows objective criteria rather than someone at the DoD going "huh, okay".
When I was young I worked in the defense industry. If I remember correctly, pushing back hard when not winning a contract was not done. I can’t imagine how much this would sour future contracts and future negotiations.
I admit a little bias since I preferred Microsoft winning this contract. I am a very happy Amazon and Google customer, but as a taxpayer I felt better about Microsoft winning this. This is just an opinion that admittedly is not based on any expertise in government procurement of cloud services.
I don't think winning a federal contract is what would allow or disallow Amazon from having a monopoly on cloud, and I don't think the current state of the market is monopoly (though oligopoly or duopoly might be appropriate).
Amazon already has GovCloud and C2S. If they also got JEDI, they would have complete lock in / monopoly for all of the federal government's cloud services. And with the length of all these contracts, they get guaranteed lock in for a long time. There needs to be competitors in the space to prevent complete lock in. Otherwise the price of re-doing all the systems for a different cloud would be immense. They could basically set whatever price they want on their services, as long as it cheaper than the cost of moving they will keep the contracts for decades to come.
> Amazon already has GovCloud and C2S. If they also got JEDI, they would have complete lock in / monopoly for all of the federal government's cloud services.
GovCloud isn't a contract, it's a region certified to meet FedRAMP-HIGH and other federal data requirements (and is available to non-federal-government customers that need that, as well as federal government.) Microsoft has an equivalent (Azure Government), and it's public regions are FedRAMP-HIGH certified. GCP also has FedRAMP-HIGH certification in many of their public regions but doesn't seem to have anything directly comparable to AWS GovCloud or Azure Government currently.
So, no, JEDI wouldn't give AWS a monopoly either on federal government cloud or cloud for people dealing with federal mandates like FedRAMP.
I did not mean to imply that GovCloud was a contract. I though it was the exclusive provider of isolated cloud services. I didn't realize Azure had its Government region. Glad that exists, I want to see that competition.
However FedRAMP is not relevant to what I was trying to say. My understanding is government itself directly uses just the AWS and now Azure isolated regions. What I was meaning to say was for the DoD, which I though was exclusively under AWS GovCloud, and AWS C2S, rather than the whole government. They could certainly be using Azure Government though.
I am glad to know there is more competition than I though. Thanks.
> My understanding is government itself directly uses just the AWS and now Azure isolated regions.
This is not true, at least based on the discussions I've been involved in with AWS reps (while my employer is a state government entity, how the feds use AWS has frequently come up.) There are US Government customers without the requirements that are only provided on the isolated regions that use the commercial offerings that have the appropriate guarantees for their data, and there are non-federal customers that use the isolated government regions for data which has the higher-level federal requirements that require those guarantees. FedRAMP isn't the only force here, but it's a key requirement that drives the choice. (Also, GovCloud was cleared for some requirements before commercial offerings, so some customers, including some federal ones, are currently on GovCloud with workloads that could be served on the commercial regions now.)
Microsoft has a pretty strong pitch for government cloud services. The department of defense runs one of the largest Active Directory deployments in the world, along with a huge install base of Windows desktops, Office, SQL Server and SharePoint.
Many of these DoD deployments have been extensively customized by Microsoft’s professional services division, which has an excellent reputation in the defense industry. Apparently Microsoft rolled lessons learned from these big deployments into their Azure offerings.
I think it’s clear that DoD can reduce costs and improve service quality by migrating to Azure managed service variants of existing Microsoft systems. Amazon is probably better for basic IaaS, but this SaaS/PaaS stuff is gonna be better on Azure, at least when you already have such a big commitment to the ecosystem.
There are probably some strategic concerns too. Amazon has been the only real cloud provider to the defense world for years. Giving Microsoft a big contract means the government will have more options in the future. This dynamic really only shows up in huge enterprises with weird needs... look at NASA for another example.
If you want to complain about Microsoft’s behavior, the best place to look is probably at the non-hosted upgrade paths for their legacy products. They could refuse to let you run Word without Office 365; Office 365 requires Azure, so you have to certify Azure for your data to keep writing documents. That’s a pretty aggressive move to pull on any client though.. the sort of thing that pushes folks to make do with Libre Office.
> If I remember correctly, pushing back hard when not winning a contract was not done. I can’t imagine how much this would sour future contracts and future negotiations.
It definitely can and does happen for big contracts. It's what you do if you think someone rigged the process and want to make the point that you won't stand for that.
I heard several stories about exactly that when I was in the defense world.
Yes. Similar experiences. Basically the position I ended up in was mandatorily selling out to Oracle with no other choice on the table. The key purchasing decision was whether Sun or HP got to bugger us for hardware. This was loudly shouted out to drown out the “why do we need oracle” question. This took months of noise and pretendering (pretend tendering) and all sorts of meetings where no one knew anything about anything that was being required. But everyone was doing Six Sigma of course do the cargo culting was justified by process. Eventually HP was pulled out of the hat because someone saw a nice shiny sales brochure.
In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).
Whats interesting is the Amazon got delayed for like a year on their other government contract due to IBM contesting their win [1]. While it might have been different in the past, contesting contracts is the way of the world these days. And that was only $600M contract. A $10B contract is worth fighting over even if it costs them millions. And the government knew it would be contested no matter who won. MS would have contested it had they not won. Unfortunately, the legal fees are just another part of the cost of the contract.
That is definitely part of the problem, they should have forced a multi cloud solution. Bring at least two vendors in, and make them compete and keep eachother honest. Either way, you need to keep the around for years, so you have time to get things set up to meet the security standards, migrate apps to the cloud(s), and all that. A 10 year contract does make sense as far as not having to keep redoing things. But as it is, that will end up a much longer contract due to vendor lock in.
I think this is meant to try and make it more of a political issue. Of course the problem is I don't think most regular people care at all if Microsoft or Amazon get the contract. Actually many regular people would probably prefer nobody get the contract.
In other words, this comes across as a hail mary.
To be fair, Trump probably did cause the contract to go to Microsoft.
If Trump really is the one who threw a wrench in the process, in theory they just need to hold up the contract until 2021 if much of the DoD begins getting cleaned out by a political competitor.
Oh it's absolutely a political issue (they cite other examples), and it's also very likely that Trump was a deciding factor considering his outspoken ire for Amazon. It's also likely that Amazon has contacts in the DoD that have told them as much.
I mean it's been as petty as the president calling for federal agencies to ban The Washington Post (Bezos-owned).
From the response:
>On JEDI, President Trump reportedly ordered former Secretary Mattis to “screw’” Amazon, blatantly interfered in an active procurement, directed his subordinate to conduct an unorthodox “review” prior to a contract award announcement and then stonewalled an investigation into his own political interference.
> I think this is meant to try and make it more of a political issue.
> To be fair, Trump probably did cause the contract to go to Microsoft.
Ironically, you're right, most people don't care about the issue at all (I certainly don't). But it sounds to me by your own account it's already a deeply political issue.
When the initial JEDI contract was announced and having used AWS, GCP, and Azure I imagined a few scenarios that might come to fruition. Considering the scale and complexity of a large 'enterprise' org AD deployment, I found it hard to believe that Microsoft would come away with nothing.
The most realistic outcome seemed like the DoD would rely on AWS for most infrastructure simply because the people at the top wouldn't know better and regulatory capture. I figured they would, almost begrudgingly, bring Azure into the mix, simply because Microsoft makes it nearly impossible these days to retain a completely on prem AD deployment and how in the hell is a bureaucratic monstrosity like the DoD going to disentangle itself from Active Directory?
Another scenario is that if whomever is in charge of making the final decision is a bit more forward thinking and has some vision, they'll go all in on a multi-cloud strategy for maximum redundancy and resiliency and we might see GCP get thrown in the mix. I think it's really hard to argue against this strategy for an org as important as the DoD frankly. Some people often make the argument that starting with one cloud platform and incrementally moving beyond that is the way to go, but I strongly disagree with this. A true multi-cloud strategy has to start by incorporating multiple platforms from the beginning or else you're extremely likely to get locked into a single platform due to organizational inertia. Not to mention the cost benefits. Locking yourself into a single vendor basically removes all your leverage to take your business and go elsewhere. You really can't bluff your way out of that one either, because what are you going to do? Go redeploy all your applications that were built with proprietary platform specific tools on a _different platform_? Nope.
I think the most unlikely, but also most interesting outcome would have been the DoD goes all in on GCP and the chromebook style of computing, basically tearing everything down and starting from scratch. If ever there was an opportunity for that, this would be it, though there are many arguments against that. I think there's a scenario in which something similar might have been possible for AWS, but in reality it doesn't seem possible, because AWS doesn't really have a competitor to G-Suite / Office365. I know they have WorkDocs, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Having used all three, including Azure, myself though, I really didn't believe a Microsoft only scenario would come about. Among other reasons, and to be fair its been a while, but last I remember Azure's annual downtown far exceeds the other two platforms, which seems like a pretty critical point when considering the systems running on here may hold soldiers lives in the balance.
Anyways, I do hope we see a more reasonable scenario come about eventually. Any single vendor locking in the DoD would be a disaster for national security, soldiers lives, and frankly the federal budget.
I very recently have built a multi-cloud empire of machines, effectively, and from my experience it is best to build for each cloud one at a time. The difference here is you have the day 1 assumption that you will be on all clouds and you don't lock yourself into vendor-specific features and make sure your platform can run anywhere with no functional differences to your users.
That's fair and totally makes sense from the perspective of someone that is able to enforce that assumption. In my experience in large orgs that condition is very difficult to enforce and that's when organizational inertia kicks in. But your method is objectively better if you can prevent people from doing dumb stuff while you keep working.
We handled it by spinning up everything via terraform and forcing dependency on those modules & resource bundles. Separate sets for each cloud provider and it all gets code reviewed by one team.
Essentially we built a platform on top of each cloud.
The difficulty there is groking the differences in network topology and access control and building something functionally equivalent everywhere.
What’s interesting about these mega contracts is that I’m sure there is consideration of second-order and long term effects, beyond the contract itself.
E.g. If awarding the JSF contract to Boeing would have caused Lockheed to go out of business, that could be quite bad in the long run, as now you have just a single major aerospace provider. As long as both planes meet the requirements and are competitive, I could certainly imagine that tipping the scales.
I think the same argument could easily apply here. AWS is the market leader by far. As long as the price and services are competitive and both meet requirements, giving the boost to #2 keeps the market more competitive for the long-haul.
Occam´s razor would suggest that there probably was some influence. But there was also likely influence in the initial creation of the RFP, favoring AMZ. In any case, the FUD in this post about ‘inferior technology’ is pretty effective at wiping away any sympathy for Amazon that I might have had..
There is also a lot of evidence though that the grownups in the room have started ignoring Trump. Look at how many of his cronies have been indicted by his own Department of Justice.
The Boeing-Lockheed example isn't the best. Most defense contractors subcontract portions of the work, even to companies they competed against.
But I do agree that a systems thinking approach is usually taken, contemplating the N-order impacts. Also, I'm pretty sure that some agencies do use AWS already (or recently did). So I don't think it's fully exclusive.
Amazon: "We have the broadest range of services and the most secure and reliable data centers, we meet every technical qualification and then some, why were we not picked."
Government: "All of that is true, but what's your managed Active Directory story look like."
Amazon: [bugs chirping] uh [crickets] we have, a, um, active directory service, it, uh [sweating] works [perjury] pretty well.
They could argue all day about the technical merits; Amazon can complain about political motivations. I think its all bullshit. The Government is, and always has been, for better or worse, a Microsoft shop. Amazon checks boxes. Microsoft solves problems. Amazon was never going to be able to walk in thirty years into the Federal Government / Microsoft relationship and steal this contract.
And, frankly, its better this way. The biggest cloud provider doesn't need to get bigger.
I've got contacts inside Azure who say that many, if not most, teams across the entire org are heads down on JEDI right now. The government invested billions of dollars into Microsoft, but Microsoft is investing right back (and always has for the government). Amazon's complaints are going to amount to absolutely nothing; Microsoft knows it, the Federal government knows it, and it seems most people even here know it. So, all this amounts to is a really, really bad look for them; like sore losers who would rather complain about losing out on billions of dollars than fix or improve the myriad of issues customers like Us have with AWS.
> Amazon was never going to be able to walk in thirty years into the Federal Government / Microsoft relationship and steal this contract.
And then, just like Boeing, we have yet another state-subsidized, substandard, doesn’t need to compete, “too big/important to fail” defense vendor. (Remember who you’re supporting with each GitHub push and npm publish. Let’s not forget that the PRISM slides are PowerPoint.)
What’s the material difference between these and state-owned enterprises?
In a state owned enterprise, the profits would generally go to the exchequer (assuming full state ownerships; otherwise dividends would be paid as normal, with the state owned portion going to the exchequer). If there were profits; in developed democracies, restrictions on state aid tend to relegate truly state owned enterprises to things like running the electricity network, which generally isn’t very profitable.
Well, the people getting evicted from their homes during a pandemic because the US spends money on JEDI instead of a social safety net are also "paying", and no, they don't have $100 for a 401k.
They're not getting evicted because the money is spent on JEDI. They're getting evicted because the State doesn't allow them to work. Ask your representatives why.
I have the local equivalent. Meaning that, yes, I personally probably benefit from these sorts of very large government contracts. I’m not sure that justifies it, though. There’s a decent argument that these mega contracts are a bad use of taxpayer money; some of them work out, but the bigger the contract, it seems, the less chance that it actually delivers in the end.
There isn’t. I am not sure there really should be. For all the claims of capitalism, the industries that the Government relies on tend to have similar characteristics regardless of who ends up owning them, regardless of country.
However the biggest productivity software provider doesn't need to get bigger either. The reality is that most technology is controlled by a tiny group of companies now and we need more competition at all levels of the stack.
I've been working in the federal gov over 20 years. You can't paint a broad brush and say it's all a Microsoft shop. It really isn't. All my clients have been on Linux/unix or going to it (yes, leaving Microsoft).
There's a sizable market for non and anti Microsoft products.
JEDI is only the start of problems for Amazon in this space. For those that don't follow the government contracting world, for the last year DoD has been in the process of releasing the Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC). In short, any contractor seeking to do business with DoD (including subcontractors) will be required to have varying levels of security controls implemented, mostly derived from NIST 800-171 Rev. 2. Current estimates put the number of effected organizations at 300,000+. We are talking a multi billion dollar industry being created via acquisition regulations.
Most organizations are shooting for a Level 3 certification, which is almost certainly going to require Impact Level 5 authorization. Having done the research on various solutions, Amazon doesn't have anything close to the solutions Microsoft has available via GCC High and M365/Azure/Azure AD/ATP/Intune/Endpoint Configuration Management/etc.
AWS still has a place, but I have a feeling Microsoft is going to increase their market share even further.
Amazon already has IL5 certification though [1]. I have loosely been keeping an eye on all the CMMC stuff, but not in detail. What does Microsoft offer that Amazon can't here? I honestly would like to know, as it could be very useful information.
Sorry for the delay responding to this. The big ones, at least for small and medium sized businesses, is going to be endpoint configuration management, Windows Defender ATP, MAM/MDM via Intune, data loss prevention, Azure AD, SSO through Azure AD, various identity management tool sets, Bitdefender, patch management, etc. On top of that, each licensed user receives a Windows 10 enterprise license, access to the entire Office desktop suite, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, Audio Conferencing #, etc.
Microsoft 365 (note: not O365) provides a very solid solution.
M365 on GCC makes it much much easier to implement the required security controls for FISMA, DFARs, ISO 27001, etc. and it provides it through one service/SLA. If I wanted to do the same things with Amazon, it would be a much more involved process, more complicated implementation, and almost certainly require multiple vendors.
Thanks for the reply, great info. We have definitely been looking at more things like Azure AD. (Or Okta maybe?) for the identity management stuff. Even AWS has one I think, but seems worse than other offerings.
It is an interesting idea to consider. We already are using Slack, GSuite, Chime, and such. More in one service could have some interesting security improvements.
Wow, I just looked into it they can even manage Macs. Very interesting. Most of our devices are Mac.
I think the majority of AWS' capabilities are provided through third-party partners (e.g., Okta, like you mentioned). I don't know for certain, but I'd be surprised if those are available on GovCloud/whatever Amazon's IL5 platform is. Use of additional services also then adds in additional SLAs, potentially additional costs, increased attack surface, etc.
Also, I don't believe that Slack, GSuite, Chime, etc. are NIST 800-171/DFARs compliant, let alone authorized at IL5. The Teams in GCC is within the GCC enclave, from what I understand.
I feel like I'm starting to sound like a Microsoft salesperson (promise I'm not!), but yeah, it's definitely worth checking out.
The JEDI RFP was seemingly written specifically for Amazon to win. (And there are accusations that they actually did influence it, since a former employee wrote parts of it [1]) It appeared that they were the only company that could possibly meet the technical requirements of it. The whole process looked like a formality to 'fairly' award them a new contract. And then Microsoft won the bid.
Its about cloud computing infrastructure, and Amazon is the leader in that sector still. Amazon already provides two government cloud services, GovCloud and C2S, and the government has invested billions of dollars in them too. So its not like they aren't already in the space, are inexperienced, and trying to 'steal' this contract away. They actually have more experience than Microsoft, when it comes to cloud services for restricted government environments.
A judge already agreed that there was enough issues in the winning proposal that Amazon's case had enough to pause the work on the contract. So I don't think its nothing at all. Using the political angle happens to be the most headline producing legal argument they have right now. No matter who won the $10B contract, someone was going to contest it. If Amazon had won, Microsoft and Oracle would be contesting.
However, I do think there needs to be competition in the space, and I am not at all upset that Microsoft won. It is a good thing to not have everything locked into AWS. Its not the outcome I expected, but it seems like a good thing. And I think that wanting competition in the space, may well have actually been a real reason to award Microsoft with the contract, even if they didn't have the best proposal.
Writing the requirements of a tender so that it can be won by a specific vendor is called “single sourcing” and it’s extremely common if you’ve ever sold to the government
Sole sourcing requires very strict guidelines though. You have to justify why that specific vendor is the exclusive one that can meet your needs and that the end result of the bid process would end up leading to them. A sole source contract for JEDI would never have been acceptable. Its way too large, you have to compete it.
I think there is some misunderstanding here in your comment and parent: I think that the parent wasn't referring to "official" sole sourcing, but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process.
An example from my country in the EU: the government decided to provide schools with prototyping boards for electronics for kids to play with and maybe learn something, with a formally open procurement process. Turns out the procurement requirements were written quite tightly around the specifications of the BBC Micro Bit board, so as to disqualify other possible products (down to board width and length).
To be honest, this specific example wouldn't cause me to worry one bit, except that after learning about it I suspect that the same procurement fixing method is used for other, more important projects.
> but rather to the (common?) phenomenon of government issuing a RFP or similar with unnecessary requirements/specifications that purposefully exclude certain possible suppliers, or are even tailored specifically to a certain product, while ostensibly allowing for a bidding process.
Correct. Also incredibly common. By the time they are discovered the money is already spent and the system is implemented. Not much can be done then.
I personally don't even like Amazon and have almost completely severed personal market ties to them, but GTFO with "investing right back".
How's that $200MM O365 performing for your enterprise, Navy? Oh, you mean you can't even reliably access email and just about everything broke post-deployment? No worries, just launch in Internet Explorer and it's sure to mostly work!
And how's that polished Teams collaboration suite treating you? A cut above with steamlined mission critical video chat that Skype hooked us up with, yeah? Oh, integrated wiki v0.1 release you say? Too bad, but thanks for the enterprise-scale beta testing, we'll be "investing right back" by providing you with an improved v1.0 release as your acquisition program office approaches a decision to exercise contract options several years from now.
And we're so sorry there's no transportability between this "Teams" and the other "Teams" deployed a few months ago...for everyone outside of your org, it's a transparent technical detail, but since these enterprise solutions are specifically tailored to your needs, just think of this roadbump as a feature!
You mean to say you needed modern source control and continuous integration capability? We're sorry, GitHub wasn't part of the contract. But hey, we know a bunch of your teams are trapped, err, voluntarily embrace our value TFS offering to process the boundless acronym soup of arbitrary work items which replaced equally arbitrary paper forms, and we know you love churning in the latest deprecated release of tfvc because git and all this command line stuff is just so inefficient. We definitely do appreciate the nice collateral revenue that all the superfluous Visual Studio licenses you've purchased through an exclusive BPA for all the managers that don't code but want to feel like they can be on point with their reports, we completely understand what it means to slowly become irrelevant. At Amazon, it's always Day 1, but at Microsoft, we understand progress and know how to get your enterprise to Day 2 and beyond!
And hey, you've got that bleeding edge SharePoint as an alternative "configuration management" tool for all your Word docs and Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations (we know you really love those) and Project files and Visio diagrams, so no real barriers there, we're here for you!
Oh, and that lean af grassroots devops team that decided it was tired of our subversive lobbying influence by making a suite of modern tools readily accessible and enable a real opportunity to flow comparable to modern agile teams, which was adopted like wildfire amongst the Pareto 20% of your engineering workforce? No worries. It's really not such a big deal that hosting on absurdly crippled AWS GovCloud puts Azure SLA in practice to shame, and it's no biggy that they were the lone entity to embrace a release of GitLab that no longer supports Internet Explorer for the sake of actual sanity and modernity. By the time your competent IT staff pushes our progressive Win10 1909 release into the wild and fixes all the network printers we recently broke, we'll have a plan in place to justify expending 9 digits of taxpayer dollars for capability that's either deficient, broken, or doesn't exist, and we'll be "investing right back" with suggestions of a new requirement that's so entrenched in our proprietary legacy baggage that no one other than us can fulfill it. Those undercompensated government engineers sacrificing career opportunities in a private industry that compensates at least 3x more for equivalent talent are just a number. We, Microsoft, are here to handle all our technical debt just for you!
The federal government, and specifically the "Intelligence Community," (which for the record is all the 3-letter agencies you can name and then some), are already large customers of AWS, with previous contracts. So to claim that the government is a Microsoft shop in the cloud sense is diametrically wrong.
I got annoyed when they misused “begs the question” immediately followed by “inspector generals” instead of inspectors general. Not sure who is writing Amazon’s press releases, but I expect more from a trillion dollar company.
I am not saying this is how DoD contract went, but many enterprise cloud accounts were won by Microsoft by throwing the weight of the Office behind it. Basically Microsoft is saying: you are using Excel and Word and Exchange/Outlook already, now we are going to host it all in the cloud. As a company you look at AWS and think - sure startup do their Unixy things in AWS, but what is Amazon’s Exchange? What is Amazon’s Excel? Will they PaaS my MSSQL instanceS? Who knows..
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 840 ms ] threadSigned your neighborhood indie bookstore; Amazon.
Regardless of what you think about Amazon, this sentence alone is incredible.
These statements seem at odds. If Trump is elected, then Amazon doesn't get contracts, but Amazon doesn't care if Trump is elected?
Or quite sure of the President’s preexisting animus and corruption, such that worrying about alienating the administration is pointless as that’s already immutably maxed out with maximum retaliation programmed in, and only replacement of the executive or outside (e.g., judicial) constraint on the executive can get the results they want.
I don’t see it being special in any circumstance for those reasons
It's what he does. Repeatedly.
I was on board until this.
If the process is corrupt (and based on all public knowledge of JEDI, it absolutely seems like the award was given based on Trump's personal idealogies) then I believe it reflects extremely positively on Amazon to finally stand up to this type of bullshit, rather than rolling over and saying "well that's just how govt contracting is".
That said, they seemed on the road to win before the do over caused the lawsuit to be put on hold, so unless DoD provably really did do it right this time, I wouldn't be surprised if they end up winning and all the do over does is delay that win.
The legal proceedings did not end in favor of their competitor, they were put on hold because DoD short-circuited the legal proceedings—which were going well for Amazon—by deciding to void the initial decision and do a do-over (in which, Amazon alleges, they simply repeated the violations for which they were challenged the first time).
They will now resume.
> In February, the Court of Federal Claims stopped performance on JEDI. The Court determined AWS’s protest had merit, and that Microsoft’s proposal likely failed to meet a key solicitation requirement and was likely deficient and ineligible for award. Our protest detailed how pervasive these errors were (impacting all six technical evaluation factors), and the Judge stopped the DoD from moving forward because the very first issue she reviewed demonstrated serious flaws.
I think this probably came down from a few levels higher up the corporate ladder than that..
The exact opposite is true: https://www.opensecrets.org/news/2018/04/women-owned-biz-rec...
Where did you even hear this claim?
Programs like this enter into it: https://business.defense.gov/Small-Business/WOSB/
You're absolutely correct that the outcome is quite transparently wildly inequitable. I think it's possible that it could be the case that both assertions could be correct at the same time.
Affirmative Action for capital owners is absurd.
Microsoft has a decades long good relationship with the DoD, specifically on the security and access control side of things.
Secondly I very much hope government procurement to the tune of billions of taxpayer dollars follows objective criteria rather than someone at the DoD going "huh, okay".
I admit a little bias since I preferred Microsoft winning this contract. I am a very happy Amazon and Google customer, but as a taxpayer I felt better about Microsoft winning this. This is just an opinion that admittedly is not based on any expertise in government procurement of cloud services.
I say that as someone who is all in on AWS.
And Congress can always pass a law to limit prices, and the Executive can easily win an antitrust case if the vendor gouges them.
GovCloud isn't a contract, it's a region certified to meet FedRAMP-HIGH and other federal data requirements (and is available to non-federal-government customers that need that, as well as federal government.) Microsoft has an equivalent (Azure Government), and it's public regions are FedRAMP-HIGH certified. GCP also has FedRAMP-HIGH certification in many of their public regions but doesn't seem to have anything directly comparable to AWS GovCloud or Azure Government currently.
So, no, JEDI wouldn't give AWS a monopoly either on federal government cloud or cloud for people dealing with federal mandates like FedRAMP.
However FedRAMP is not relevant to what I was trying to say. My understanding is government itself directly uses just the AWS and now Azure isolated regions. What I was meaning to say was for the DoD, which I though was exclusively under AWS GovCloud, and AWS C2S, rather than the whole government. They could certainly be using Azure Government though.
I am glad to know there is more competition than I though. Thanks.
This is not true, at least based on the discussions I've been involved in with AWS reps (while my employer is a state government entity, how the feds use AWS has frequently come up.) There are US Government customers without the requirements that are only provided on the isolated regions that use the commercial offerings that have the appropriate guarantees for their data, and there are non-federal customers that use the isolated government regions for data which has the higher-level federal requirements that require those guarantees. FedRAMP isn't the only force here, but it's a key requirement that drives the choice. (Also, GovCloud was cleared for some requirements before commercial offerings, so some customers, including some federal ones, are currently on GovCloud with workloads that could be served on the commercial regions now.)
Many of these DoD deployments have been extensively customized by Microsoft’s professional services division, which has an excellent reputation in the defense industry. Apparently Microsoft rolled lessons learned from these big deployments into their Azure offerings.
I think it’s clear that DoD can reduce costs and improve service quality by migrating to Azure managed service variants of existing Microsoft systems. Amazon is probably better for basic IaaS, but this SaaS/PaaS stuff is gonna be better on Azure, at least when you already have such a big commitment to the ecosystem.
There are probably some strategic concerns too. Amazon has been the only real cloud provider to the defense world for years. Giving Microsoft a big contract means the government will have more options in the future. This dynamic really only shows up in huge enterprises with weird needs... look at NASA for another example.
If you want to complain about Microsoft’s behavior, the best place to look is probably at the non-hosted upgrade paths for their legacy products. They could refuse to let you run Word without Office 365; Office 365 requires Azure, so you have to certify Azure for your data to keep writing documents. That’s a pretty aggressive move to pull on any client though.. the sort of thing that pushes folks to make do with Libre Office.
Government should run on open standards.
At least two high-profile companies (SpaceX being the better known one) have done just that very successfully in the last few years.
It definitely can and does happen for big contracts. It's what you do if you think someone rigged the process and want to make the point that you won't stand for that.
I heard several stories about exactly that when I was in the defense world.
In the end, £1m down the shitter, 9 web pages written in JSP backed with a full 42U rack HP/UX crate running oracle was seen as a success. The whole platform was scrap in three years. each http request made cost £83 in the end ($100ish).
And that’s defence spending in a nutshell.
No one says a thing to stop this happening.
[1] https://www.informationweek.com/cloud/infrastructure-as-a-se...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KC-X
In other words, this comes across as a hail mary.
To be fair, Trump probably did cause the contract to go to Microsoft.
I mean it's been as petty as the president calling for federal agencies to ban The Washington Post (Bezos-owned).
From the response:
>On JEDI, President Trump reportedly ordered former Secretary Mattis to “screw’” Amazon, blatantly interfered in an active procurement, directed his subordinate to conduct an unorthodox “review” prior to a contract award announcement and then stonewalled an investigation into his own political interference.
> To be fair, Trump probably did cause the contract to go to Microsoft.
Ironically, you're right, most people don't care about the issue at all (I certainly don't). But it sounds to me by your own account it's already a deeply political issue.
The most realistic outcome seemed like the DoD would rely on AWS for most infrastructure simply because the people at the top wouldn't know better and regulatory capture. I figured they would, almost begrudgingly, bring Azure into the mix, simply because Microsoft makes it nearly impossible these days to retain a completely on prem AD deployment and how in the hell is a bureaucratic monstrosity like the DoD going to disentangle itself from Active Directory?
Another scenario is that if whomever is in charge of making the final decision is a bit more forward thinking and has some vision, they'll go all in on a multi-cloud strategy for maximum redundancy and resiliency and we might see GCP get thrown in the mix. I think it's really hard to argue against this strategy for an org as important as the DoD frankly. Some people often make the argument that starting with one cloud platform and incrementally moving beyond that is the way to go, but I strongly disagree with this. A true multi-cloud strategy has to start by incorporating multiple platforms from the beginning or else you're extremely likely to get locked into a single platform due to organizational inertia. Not to mention the cost benefits. Locking yourself into a single vendor basically removes all your leverage to take your business and go elsewhere. You really can't bluff your way out of that one either, because what are you going to do? Go redeploy all your applications that were built with proprietary platform specific tools on a _different platform_? Nope.
I think the most unlikely, but also most interesting outcome would have been the DoD goes all in on GCP and the chromebook style of computing, basically tearing everything down and starting from scratch. If ever there was an opportunity for that, this would be it, though there are many arguments against that. I think there's a scenario in which something similar might have been possible for AWS, but in reality it doesn't seem possible, because AWS doesn't really have a competitor to G-Suite / Office365. I know they have WorkDocs, but that's not exactly the same thing.
Having used all three, including Azure, myself though, I really didn't believe a Microsoft only scenario would come about. Among other reasons, and to be fair its been a while, but last I remember Azure's annual downtown far exceeds the other two platforms, which seems like a pretty critical point when considering the systems running on here may hold soldiers lives in the balance.
Anyways, I do hope we see a more reasonable scenario come about eventually. Any single vendor locking in the DoD would be a disaster for national security, soldiers lives, and frankly the federal budget.
Essentially we built a platform on top of each cloud.
The difficulty there is groking the differences in network topology and access control and building something functionally equivalent everywhere.
Hint: There are no winners.
E.g. If awarding the JSF contract to Boeing would have caused Lockheed to go out of business, that could be quite bad in the long run, as now you have just a single major aerospace provider. As long as both planes meet the requirements and are competitive, I could certainly imagine that tipping the scales.
I think the same argument could easily apply here. AWS is the market leader by far. As long as the price and services are competitive and both meet requirements, giving the boost to #2 keeps the market more competitive for the long-haul.
Occam´s razor would suggest that there probably was some influence. But there was also likely influence in the initial creation of the RFP, favoring AMZ. In any case, the FUD in this post about ‘inferior technology’ is pretty effective at wiping away any sympathy for Amazon that I might have had..
But I do agree that a systems thinking approach is usually taken, contemplating the N-order impacts. Also, I'm pretty sure that some agencies do use AWS already (or recently did). So I don't think it's fully exclusive.
https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/05/07/amazon-...
?
Government: "All of that is true, but what's your managed Active Directory story look like."
Amazon: [bugs chirping] uh [crickets] we have, a, um, active directory service, it, uh [sweating] works [perjury] pretty well.
They could argue all day about the technical merits; Amazon can complain about political motivations. I think its all bullshit. The Government is, and always has been, for better or worse, a Microsoft shop. Amazon checks boxes. Microsoft solves problems. Amazon was never going to be able to walk in thirty years into the Federal Government / Microsoft relationship and steal this contract.
And, frankly, its better this way. The biggest cloud provider doesn't need to get bigger.
I've got contacts inside Azure who say that many, if not most, teams across the entire org are heads down on JEDI right now. The government invested billions of dollars into Microsoft, but Microsoft is investing right back (and always has for the government). Amazon's complaints are going to amount to absolutely nothing; Microsoft knows it, the Federal government knows it, and it seems most people even here know it. So, all this amounts to is a really, really bad look for them; like sore losers who would rather complain about losing out on billions of dollars than fix or improve the myriad of issues customers like Us have with AWS.
And then, just like Boeing, we have yet another state-subsidized, substandard, doesn’t need to compete, “too big/important to fail” defense vendor. (Remember who you’re supporting with each GitHub push and npm publish. Let’s not forget that the PRISM slides are PowerPoint.)
What’s the material difference between these and state-owned enterprises?
Where the profits go.
It’s turtles all the way down.
Setting aside $50 a month, no initial investment.
https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=...
$100/month
https://www.calculator.net/investment-calculator.html?ctype=...
If you can't afford that, you're not funding JEDI.
For the amount of dollars at stake the government should have focused on creating a hybrid cloud solution than just going all in with any one provider
Please.
"The Government is, and always has been, for better or worse, a Microsoft shop."
So MS Government Monopoly is a great reason to use MS? Really?
"And, frankly, its better this way. The biggest cloud provider doesn't need to get bigger."
This is the wrong answer.
" if not most, teams across the entire org are heads down on JEDI right now."
This is not relevant if MS doesn't have the right solution.
None of what you have said really changes the situation, other than possibly Active Directory, but I don't think so.
Amazon has made some serious claims about lack of oversight and those should be looked at.
There's a sizable market for non and anti Microsoft products.
Most organizations are shooting for a Level 3 certification, which is almost certainly going to require Impact Level 5 authorization. Having done the research on various solutions, Amazon doesn't have anything close to the solutions Microsoft has available via GCC High and M365/Azure/Azure AD/ATP/Intune/Endpoint Configuration Management/etc.
AWS still has a place, but I have a feeling Microsoft is going to increase their market share even further.
[1] https://aws.amazon.com/govcloud-us/dodsrg/
Anything to do with client device management, security, or attestation. Which matters a lot to the DoD.
Microsoft 365 (note: not O365) provides a very solid solution.
M365 on GCC makes it much much easier to implement the required security controls for FISMA, DFARs, ISO 27001, etc. and it provides it through one service/SLA. If I wanted to do the same things with Amazon, it would be a much more involved process, more complicated implementation, and almost certainly require multiple vendors.
It is an interesting idea to consider. We already are using Slack, GSuite, Chime, and such. More in one service could have some interesting security improvements.
Wow, I just looked into it they can even manage Macs. Very interesting. Most of our devices are Mac.
I think the majority of AWS' capabilities are provided through third-party partners (e.g., Okta, like you mentioned). I don't know for certain, but I'd be surprised if those are available on GovCloud/whatever Amazon's IL5 platform is. Use of additional services also then adds in additional SLAs, potentially additional costs, increased attack surface, etc.
Also, I don't believe that Slack, GSuite, Chime, etc. are NIST 800-171/DFARs compliant, let alone authorized at IL5. The Teams in GCC is within the GCC enclave, from what I understand.
I feel like I'm starting to sound like a Microsoft salesperson (promise I'm not!), but yeah, it's definitely worth checking out.
Its about cloud computing infrastructure, and Amazon is the leader in that sector still. Amazon already provides two government cloud services, GovCloud and C2S, and the government has invested billions of dollars in them too. So its not like they aren't already in the space, are inexperienced, and trying to 'steal' this contract away. They actually have more experience than Microsoft, when it comes to cloud services for restricted government environments.
A judge already agreed that there was enough issues in the winning proposal that Amazon's case had enough to pause the work on the contract. So I don't think its nothing at all. Using the political angle happens to be the most headline producing legal argument they have right now. No matter who won the $10B contract, someone was going to contest it. If Amazon had won, Microsoft and Oracle would be contesting.
However, I do think there needs to be competition in the space, and I am not at all upset that Microsoft won. It is a good thing to not have everything locked into AWS. Its not the outcome I expected, but it seems like a good thing. And I think that wanting competition in the space, may well have actually been a real reason to award Microsoft with the contract, even if they didn't have the best proposal.
[1] Oracle was also fighting against this contract too, because they want it. https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/03/oracle-loses-10b-jedi-clou...
An example from my country in the EU: the government decided to provide schools with prototyping boards for electronics for kids to play with and maybe learn something, with a formally open procurement process. Turns out the procurement requirements were written quite tightly around the specifications of the BBC Micro Bit board, so as to disqualify other possible products (down to board width and length).
To be honest, this specific example wouldn't cause me to worry one bit, except that after learning about it I suspect that the same procurement fixing method is used for other, more important projects.
Correct. Also incredibly common. By the time they are discovered the money is already spent and the system is implemented. Not much can be done then.
How's that $200MM O365 performing for your enterprise, Navy? Oh, you mean you can't even reliably access email and just about everything broke post-deployment? No worries, just launch in Internet Explorer and it's sure to mostly work!
And how's that polished Teams collaboration suite treating you? A cut above with steamlined mission critical video chat that Skype hooked us up with, yeah? Oh, integrated wiki v0.1 release you say? Too bad, but thanks for the enterprise-scale beta testing, we'll be "investing right back" by providing you with an improved v1.0 release as your acquisition program office approaches a decision to exercise contract options several years from now.
And we're so sorry there's no transportability between this "Teams" and the other "Teams" deployed a few months ago...for everyone outside of your org, it's a transparent technical detail, but since these enterprise solutions are specifically tailored to your needs, just think of this roadbump as a feature!
You mean to say you needed modern source control and continuous integration capability? We're sorry, GitHub wasn't part of the contract. But hey, we know a bunch of your teams are trapped, err, voluntarily embrace our value TFS offering to process the boundless acronym soup of arbitrary work items which replaced equally arbitrary paper forms, and we know you love churning in the latest deprecated release of tfvc because git and all this command line stuff is just so inefficient. We definitely do appreciate the nice collateral revenue that all the superfluous Visual Studio licenses you've purchased through an exclusive BPA for all the managers that don't code but want to feel like they can be on point with their reports, we completely understand what it means to slowly become irrelevant. At Amazon, it's always Day 1, but at Microsoft, we understand progress and know how to get your enterprise to Day 2 and beyond!
And hey, you've got that bleeding edge SharePoint as an alternative "configuration management" tool for all your Word docs and Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations (we know you really love those) and Project files and Visio diagrams, so no real barriers there, we're here for you!
Oh, and that lean af grassroots devops team that decided it was tired of our subversive lobbying influence by making a suite of modern tools readily accessible and enable a real opportunity to flow comparable to modern agile teams, which was adopted like wildfire amongst the Pareto 20% of your engineering workforce? No worries. It's really not such a big deal that hosting on absurdly crippled AWS GovCloud puts Azure SLA in practice to shame, and it's no biggy that they were the lone entity to embrace a release of GitLab that no longer supports Internet Explorer for the sake of actual sanity and modernity. By the time your competent IT staff pushes our progressive Win10 1909 release into the wild and fixes all the network printers we recently broke, we'll have a plan in place to justify expending 9 digits of taxpayer dollars for capability that's either deficient, broken, or doesn't exist, and we'll be "investing right back" with suggestions of a new requirement that's so entrenched in our proprietary legacy baggage that no one other than us can fulfill it. Those undercompensated government engineers sacrificing career opportunities in a private industry that compensates at least 3x more for equivalent talent are just a number. We, Microsoft, are here to handle all our technical debt just for you!
I swear you can't make this stuff up.
The federal government, and specifically the "Intelligence Community," (which for the record is all the 3-letter agencies you can name and then some), are already large customers of AWS, with previous contracts. So to claim that the government is a Microsoft shop in the cloud sense is diametrically wrong.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html