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Pentagon cancels $10 billion JEDI cloud contract that Amazon and Microsoft were fighting over
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. But it's also announcing a new contract and soliciting proposals from both cloud service providers where both will likely clinch a reward.
The JEDI, or Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, deal has become one of the most tangled contracts for the DOD. 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."
[...] 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.
Also at c|net, SecurityWeek, Al Jazera, and The Washington Post.
Previously: Amazon, Microsoft Wage War Over the Pentagon's "War Cloud"
Pentagon Beams Down $10bn JEDI Contract to Microsoft: Windows Giant Beats Off Bezos
Pentagon's $10BN Jedi Decision 'Risky for the Country and Democracy,' Says AWS CEO Jassy
Amazon Wins Court Injunction on Controversial JEDI Contract
(Score: 1) by fustakrakich on Tuesday July 06 2021, @08:54PM
10 billion, each!
La politica e i criminali sono la stessa cosa..
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 06 2021, @09:04PM
Pentagon: I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further
(Score: 1, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday July 06 2021, @09:14PM (4 children)
I remember bits and pieces of contracts written by the Navy back in the day. There were a number of blocks to check off. Of course, any contractor had to be big enough, and experienced enough, that you could expect them to complete the contract. But, going down the checklists, you were required to favor minority owned businesses. Then, small business. Meaning, you had to shop for a minority owned small business that could credibly provide the goods and services. If no minority owned businesses qualified, you had to shop small businesses that weren't minority owned. Only after you had checked all the boxes, could you use a large corporation. Once you made that jump to large corporation territory, you had another checklist to go through - and again, you were supposed to favor the smaller corporations.
Whatever happened to that idea?
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 06 2021, @09:25PM (2 children)
It is still there.
But, try to name the "minority owned cloud provider" or the "small business cloud provider".....
That's the problem. There aren't any. So one ends up at the MS's and Amazon's.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 06 2021, @09:36PM (1 child)
So pay reparations to the Afro-Americans, convince them to spend it on servers instead of crack and BLM t-shirts, and then give them contracts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @09:36PM
The only reparations i would support is a cruise ship ticket and some money to get started in whichever African countries want them in exchange for the renouncing of their US citizenship.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 06 2021, @09:38PM
Now, and it was true back then, the intent is that with all else being equal, the scale should tip towards the small/disadvantaged/etc. business. Being able to meet the contract need still wins out over everything, so you are not forced to go with one of them provided you can justify the reason. Here it sounds like they're saying the job is too big for anyone but these two to satisfy (and Google, I'm sure). I think the small business set asides are good ideas so that it keeps one from just going with the same guys kind of mindset (like how my wife just orders everything from Amazon because it is easy), but whenever any new rule is put out, there are people who try to game the system.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Tuesday July 06 2021, @11:00PM (11 children)
I'd be favouring Amazon: is MS Cloud secure? Nothing else of theirs is.
For $10 billion, couldn't the DOD put together their own cloud? Shouldn't be that hard for that kind of money. Hire some Amazon people or have Amazon build it for them but have it solely within the DOD.
For $10 billion, i'm sure i could cobble something together better than MS could.
Let's get RMS on this right away.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 2) by stormreaver on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:02AM
You, me, and my senile, lazy cat could build something better than MS could for that kind of money.
(Score: 2) by hopdevil on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:30AM (1 child)
What makes you think AWS is secure?
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:53AM
Can't be less secure than a MS product!
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:31AM (4 children)
The problem is, this is government. The managers involved must have some backstop to blame when something breaks.
If they built it themselves, they would save a shit-ton of money, but when something breaks and important file X happens to be lost, then it is their ass on the hot frying pan.
Instead, they can pay 10-20x the cost of doing it themselves (note, it is not their money they are spending), and insulate their own asses from that hot frying pan by having the vendor be the backstop of last resort when something breaks and important file X is lost. They can then blame the vendor.
That's why they don't roll their own. They spend other people's money, and by doing so, insulate their own ass from the hot frying pan.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @02:54AM (3 children)
I'm not sure if you realize this, but if they wrote it themselves, they're spending the same money. It might be less money to write it, but the money comes from the same place. Now whether it is cheaper to do it themselves and maintain it is another argument.
The rest of your comment (well, actually the whole thing) is ignorant.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @03:06AM (2 children)
Posted by someone who's clearly never worked in a govt. department ever.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @06:01PM (1 child)
Do you think that it costs money to have a contractor do something, but it is free if the government does it? Do you even know how money works? How appropriations work? Where appropriations come from?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @06:57PM
Not at all. You are massively hallucinating things that were never said in the GP comment.
Here is your hallucination: "free if the government does it" was never stated, anywhere. That was farted out of your mind only. What was stated was: "pay 10-20x the cost of doing it themselves". In order to pay 10x-20x the cost of DIY, there has to be a cost to DIY which is larger than "free".
But anyone who's ever worked in govt. contracting has seen the pattern of CYA by the govt. people.
They will pay 10x-20x or more of the cost of "do it yourself" (note, there is an unstated cost of DIY here, it is just cheaper than having a contractor do the same) just to have "support" from the vendor in the rare instance when something goes wrong, and all to avoid themselves being at risk from the rare "something going wrong".
Anyone who has ever had any even passing contact with the govt. contracting process will have seen this pattern over and over. The fact that your comment implies you've never seen the pattern then heavily implies you have never had any even passing contact with govt. contracting and are therefore just yelling out of your ass.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Socrastotle on Wednesday July 07 2021, @05:32AM (2 children)
This is the thing that seems especially absurd about stuff like this. "Cloud" is little more than a euphemism for remote servers, acting like scalable performance is some amazing new invention. And $10 billion is enough to buy *ten million* servers at $1000 a piece. Of course when you're ordering at that sort of scale, you can also send that price way down through economy of scale. But they're not buying anything at all, they're 100% renting this capability for 10 years. This is effectively enough to build an entire cloud business, from scratch, and still meet the requirements of the contract.
I expect this is same for most of the stuff related to our military industrial complex, but the numbers are less familiar to us - because how many people can genuinely tell you how much it would reasonably cost to make a missile, or an armored truck, or whatever else. In any case, Eisenhower had it right [yale.edu] and we failed to heed his warning.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @04:20PM (1 child)
I used to think that, and that is definitely one version of cloud. However, there is a lot more to "cloud" than that. For example, look at AWS Lambda. That's more than just "somebody else's computer" (although of course, it IS somebody else's computer).
I also think you are dramatically underrating how much time and effort it takes to do a Project. Just look at the kickstarter and all the "merely" $10,000 projects which are late and over budget. We all know the "boss comes in and asks you to make a website, it should only take about a week, right?" This is that, only we are the ignorant boss in this case.
As for the "reasonably cost to make a missile," that's all very well documented in how much it does cost. There is a reason comedians can joke about it and newspapers can report on it. As for how much it "should" cost... well, if you think it should cost less, you are welcome to explain your math; or even better, make a new company, undercut the prices by 10%, and become very rich.
(Score: 2) by Socrastotle on Wednesday July 07 2021, @05:04PM
Stuff like AWS Lambda is what I was referring to by pretending that dynamically scalable performance is some revolutionary breakthrough. Any site hitting sufficient volume, any video game (like an MMO) with spikes in player count, and countless other applications have built scalable server systems on time frames starting decades ago.
The only reason "cloud computing" exists is because 20 years ago if you bought a new PC, it'd be outdated in 3 months and obsolete in 6. Today? That computer you bought years ago is still 100% fine for all of your tasks. For oversized tech companies that need to generate billions of dollars in revenue just to break even, this was a complete gamechanger. They need rent and the cloud provides it. Nobody in their right mind would ever rent a word processor but "put it on the cloud" and now they're cool paying a monthly fee, forever.
As for "just make a new company and compete." This very article emphasizes the problem in our society. Amazon just "won" this contract like they "won" the Artemis contract. An aerospace company that's existed for 20 years, and has yet to manage to put a single thing into orbit, managed to win a contract to land stuff on the Moon. I have a feeling that we're far closer to the end of our tale than most realize.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Rosco P. Coltrane on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:37AM (2 children)
Allocate the budget to roll your own cloud you corrupt fucks. It's national defense we're talking about. Neither Microsoft nor Amazon should have a single byte of that data on their hard drives.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @12:50AM (1 child)
How very true, but it won't happen.
If they rolled their own, they'd have no one to blame and point fingers towards as the one at fault when something went wrong. They would instead have to take that blame themselves. And govt. managers very much do not want to be the one taking the blame. So they will spend 20x the cost of a roll your own system just so they have someone else (the vendor) to blame should something go wrong.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 07 2021, @06:16PM
You really don't understand how contracting accountability works, do you? Here's a clue: it doesn't work like you explained it. It isn't some magical ass-covering mechanism. Financially, the contracting officer's ass is always on the line, as are a number of asses down the line. From a program manager's perspective, "if something goes wrong" it is the PMs reputation on the line; they are the one managing the contract. If something messes up and it is the contractor's fault, the contractor has to pay to make it right, unless the PM wrote the contract requirements so poorly that the contractor doesn't have to, and then it comes back to the PM.
A big reason that the government wouldn't want to take on writing their own very complicated system is that they aren't staffed to do it. They would have to increase the staff to do it, then to maintain it long term. And if it isn't a long term thing, then they now have more people on board that they have to find other work for when it is over. Meanwhile, a group of contractors tell you that they can do it for a fixed price, and maintain it for as long as you want, then you can walk away from it when it is no longer needed. From a budget and schedule standpoint, that is not a hard decision to make, even if in principle it would make more sense for the government to have that capability and expertise in house. And for contracts of this size, you also have tremendous lobbying pressure onto Congress that the government is unfairly competing with the private sector, and some well-placed lobbying pressure transfers down to the agency head who has to go to Congress every year to ask for money.
This kind of thing is a lot more subtle than your junior high school view of how things work.