Oracle takes its gripes about Pentagon's JEDI contract to federal court Fresh from defeat at the hands of the US Government Accountability Office, Oracle has taken its battle against the single-vendor Pentagon cloud contract to court. The legacy database biz filed a suit against the Department of Defense in the US Court of Federal Claims last week, and the redacted complaint was published …
On the one hand, I have enormous sympathy for the proposition that the DND (especially, but government in general) shouldn't be entering into massive single-source contracts. There aren't many examples of that coming out well, and when it occasionally does it's usually because of a "cost is no object" approach that's hardly what we want encourage.
On the other hand, it's Oracle making the argument...
One of Leisure Suit Larry's complaints is vendor lock-in. No matter how much you try to avoid lock-in you will have some degree of lock-in. Whether is proprietary products with proprietary file formats, a query languages with non-standard syntax and extensions (looking at you Larry, you lying scumbag), familiarity with the UI, or something else you end up with a degree lock-in with any product. Whether DOD selects AWS, Azure, or someone else they will have some degree of lock-in even with Larry's Minions.
The main advantage with a sole source cloud contract is to have one point of contact instead of many possibly incompatible systems in use. One way to drive up the costs of a system is to have parts from many vendors with no one have the responsibility to make it all work. You saw with the Obamacare rollout, no one vendor had the authority to force the subvendors in line, so you ended up a morass of non-functioning, incompetently designed and written systems that did not work together. Note of the chief offenders was Larry's Minions.
They are right though that the argument that single sourcing will improve things is specious at best. At worst it will lead to lazy programmers unintentionally designing lock-in to Amazon's cloud, so when the 10 years are up the DoD will have no choice but to pay whatever they demand because it will cost too much and take too long to make things portable.
Having multiple suppliers guarantee that it is done right, especially if everything has to be regularly tested on a different cloud from that used for production.
> the government has introduced "unduly restrictive requirements"
Translation: It has to, you know, actually work.
> which will "cause Oracle significant competitive prejudice".
Translation: Ours doesn't work.
> A key component of this "second generation cloud" [ ... ] is the bare-metal server [ ... ] which would tackle the "incredible vulnerability" of running sensitive cloud-control software and customer-provided code on the same computers [ ... ]
Translation: We want you to buy a lot of servers from us. And then we'll audit you for license compliance and extort more money from you.
To be fair "legacy" is just one of those playground name calling things. It's intended to win the argument without the need to actually examine the facts.
I quite like the idea of the military using the cloud though. Sorry, D-day is delayed as our cloud provider was down for four hours.
Oops, the reason the enemy was waiting for us is that we failed to secure our cloud storage.
Oh dear, thanks to spectre/meltdown our own drones are now attacking us!
Such fun......
If you're gonna do that, you require certain expertise...and may as well not contract it out to begin with.
The point of cloud is leveraging some expertise at the vendor end, presumably including more than just keeping lights on and perhaps doing the odd backup...if they can manage to make that atomic.
Not sure if the BBC is being a useful idiot here, or is sacrificing it's journalistic integrity on the altar of fast news, but somebody is obviously funding dirty tricks.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-46489689
This is the type of trash that is most likely to come from a large corporate sponsor paying someone to create FUD
Personally I give the journalists the benefit of the doubt and assume they are useful idiots with a web browser.
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