Like the Death Star on Endor, JEDI created a ton of fallout and stormy weather in cloud market Late on Friday, word broke that the US Department of Defense had decided to award the massive 10-year, $10bn Joint Enterprise Defense Initiative contract to Microsoft. Coming at the tail end of the Friday news dump period, the decision caught everyone a bit off guard. Now, having had a weekend to digest the news, where do …
Hmm, now I get it. Sorry, I've been away.
But now I'm waiting for the picture on the next story of a giant red robot, that instead of the article when clicked on takes you to a recording of the cover version of Starfleet, (80's anime redub, sorry I forget the name of the original series), performed by Brian May and Eddie Van Halen.
I think my copy of the 12" is filed next to my geek card...
"Where's the Modaratrix when you need her?"
Some say she lives alone on an island in the Pacific, shooting and eating anyone who tries to make contact
Others say she went was surprised by a gaggle of commentard fan's and in the ensuing melee-turned-murderous rampage was subsequently captured and imprisoned, never to see the cold, harsh light of a English winter again.
Others say she was just a normal person who managed to escape the madness of ElReg forums.
Who will ever know?
I'd have to watch that episode again (In the Shadow of Zha'ha'dum(sp?) part 2, IIRC? can't believe I can remember that without looking it up), but I always thought it *was* indeed Kosh, whose "soul" had somehow entered or become part of Sheridan after the former's assassination.
I thought the voice was distinctly Kosh and not Lorien. Seeing as I have them all on VHS(!) still, it'll be a bit of an effort to check (yes, I bet I could get them all from less legal venues).
Yes, it was Kosh who said, "Jump. Now!" If you recall, the Vorlon could "break off a piece of their consciousness" and place it in another individual so there was a piece of Kosh still alive in Sheridan at the time. It later had to be drawn out of him by Lorien to fight the not so nice Vorlon. (Sorry, I just got done watching the series. I have it on DVD.)
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>I would be highly surprised if they demanded any backdoors into their own system for which they have the front-door keys!
But into any other systems.
A suspicion of quid-pro-quo might go along with any order this big.
Microsoft might turn over the keys to the Dems email server, while all Amazon could offer was Bernie's Christmas wish list
Is anybody around here actually familiar with what JEDI is supposed to do? I did some Googling and found lots of articles about the process of awarding the contract, but very little about what the $10B actually is to buy. The closest I could come was from the BBC https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-50191242
The Department of Defense wants to replace its ageing computer networks with a single cloud system.
Under the contract, Microsoft will provide artificial intelligence-based analysis and host classified military secrets among other services.
...
It is hoped that Jedi will give the military better access to data and the cloud from battlefields.
That looks to me to be quite nebulous. They're going to draft Clippy and send him off to fight ... Who? How? Why would anyone even think that might be a good idea? They are going to make battlespace management dependent on some sort of AI entity/entities at the end of a probably questionably reliable communications link?
This sort of reminds me of the 1960s era USAF Automated Logistics System which managed to burn through $250M (big money back then -- a couple of billion in current dollars) on a poorly defined mission and ended up with pretty much nothing to show for it.
I imagine that Microsoft will make money off this. But I wouldn't be shocked to find that in the long run there will be a lot of folks at MS who will end up wishing Amazon had been awarded the contract.
Howdy, vtcodger,
Do you see any difference and all of the similarities in what are certainly surely competitive contemporaries into Advanced Warefighting Experiments?
A rhetorical question easily asked after reading .... They are going to make battlespace management dependent on some sort of AI entity/entities at the end of a probably questionably reliable communications link? and of its renegade rogue/private pirate parallel revealed here ...... Programs running changed worlds making Initial Connection with Quantum Communication Control Systems and introducing themselves to you here. Hi. What would you have AI and IT do for you too.
Are you ready for Machines Broad Band Casting Virtually Anonymous Decisions with Future Paths Presented via Media for All to Follow …. and Witness/Experience?
Welcome to the Experimental Augmenting Reality that are Live Operational Virtual Environments. .... Re: Secretive companies and Holy Orders ...... for they both say essentially practically the same virtual thing.
Is anybody around here actually familiar with what JEDI is supposed to do?
It's the usual challenge with 'cloud' and users. Especially manglement users who see 'cloud' and want it because it's the latest buzz.
Pragmatically, it should provide DoD customers with a catalogue service where they can order compute resources with pre-defined security templates, OSs* that the users can run their applications on. So basically outsourcing the need to procure, configure and house dedicated tin, and dedicated network capacity.
*Probably also why MS won, because a lot of DoD users still want/need the regular business apps we all know and love. So standardising packages of plain'ol Windows and Office and deploying that. Amazon can do the compute part of the cloud, but would've still needed to buy MS licences.
I've followed this reasonably closely since 2012 when AWS/Google started to make significant in-roads into DoD IT infrastructure.
Lets start with the simple stuff - this is not public cloud. It is a combination of GovCloud facilities meeting very stringent hosting requirements combined with specialist resources available only to parts of US government (i.e. as Google doesn't have full GovCloud acreditation, a lot of their facilities are basically dedicated solely to the NSA/DoD/CIA/NRO). This hosting model has been used by the DoD since the late 90's when they first started outsourcing data centre management so it is nothing new. The DoD has around 60 vendors managing more than 200 of these data centres and it is expensive.
Where JEDI comes in is as a 3rd (possibly 4th) attempt at rationalising spending on these managed data centres. Previous attempts have been met by uncooperative vendors - yes they reduce costs, but then any changes cost significantly more leading to a higher overall spend. In 2012, Google and AWS were given small projects to start to develop the groundwork for JEDI - this involved reviewing and updating access, security and vendor demarcation for a large-scale multi-vendor outsourced hosting environment which became GovCloud. Note that AWS/Google were not the only participants in this process, but they initiated a lot of the early changes to allow the DoD to clean up what was arguably a multi-vendor security nightmare.
Since GovCloud has been active, all existing vendors have had to bring their infrastructure up to the required level and it has been expensive for the DoD who have absorbed the cost of poor standards on the vendors side and poor contracts on the DoD side. Where possible, the DoD has been decommissioning data centres rather than bringing them up to GovCloud specs because they see a requirement for around 100 data centres in a model with a few large cloud providers, one data centre per state for low latency access to local resources and a few specialist data centres for projects such as the F35. All connectivity between DoD sites is via dedicated circuits and Internet access is only available via very tightly controlled locations. Just to restate - this is not public cloud.
With the move to decommission data centres, A LOT of existing systems and the majority of new systems were moving into GovCloud hosting, particularly IBM/Oracle/AWS/Azure. The cost of this hosting is currently ~$1.5bn/year and growing at ~10% per year.
To control this massive cost increase (, the JEDI contract was created - the intention is to avoid paying for 4 providers with significant geo-redundancy (DoD GovCloud requires East cost/West coast locations plus one other) and instead pay for one provider for a significant amount of contracted capacity at a flat rate of upto $1bn/year over 10 years. The key points are:
- providers with existing facilities have a major advantage. This effectively limited JEDI to IBM/Oracle/AWS/Azure as Google does not have the accreditation and publicly withdrew from JEDI. I do not believe that IBM or Oracle have the necessary infrastructure to support JEDI requirements today.
- any delays to the project start (i.e. waiting for vendors to acquire/build data centre space) would likely result in the DoD incurring significant operational costs as GovCloud spending continued to increase
- it is estimated that more than half of existing GovCloud hosting is with AWS
- rumours were that the larger plan was to distribute office tasks (O365 etc) to Azure GovCloud and other back office systems to AWS and there was evidence that this had been happening over recent years.
- JEDI is the first contract, there are likely to be more, although whether the existing vendor will have an advantage is unclear.
- JEDI is likely to result in faster decommissioning of legacy data centres as savings are sought. affecting a number of big military vendors. These vendors include IBM and Oracle and benefit from significant revenue from these, so a delayed migration is a bonus.
While I can understand IBM/Oracle being unhappy at the tender favouring AWS and Azure, their tenders asked for a two year period to build out new infrastructure - something that would likely cost the DoD $1bn+ versus AWS/Azure who already had a significant presence in the right locations (basically Virginia plus a west coast locations with multiple availability zones and plans to expand to include a southern US location).
In addition, following "old style Government contracts", Oracle and IBM expected the DoD to fork out around $200 million to develop the new facilities.
I'm not entirely surprised that Azure got the contract given the issues raised and level it reached in the US Government, but I suspect it will make little real difference in the longer term as a JEDI2 run between AWS/IBM/Oracle/Google would likely see AWS win and avoid the DoD paying to move stuff between cloud providers with minimal cost savings (versus the cost savings of legacy to cloud migrations due to high overheads of running legacy DC's).
TL;DR: DoD trying to save money. DoD wanted AWS, got Azure and its likely good enough to achieve what they wanted. Expect a sequel in coming years.
For over 40 years, Microsoft has delivered innovative, proven and secure technologies to the US Department of Defense
Now this was a surprise: "the innovative, proven and secure technologies" part. My BS meter went off the scale.
On the other hand... is MS security better than AWS? Hmm.... <tosses coin in the air>
the contract is only guarenteed for 2 years and $1million, admittedly DoD intend to spend atleast $210million in the first year, but whats the betting that under the new administration in 2021 they get AWS in and migrate everythign accross.
Larry and IBM have lost out because they didnt get in on the ground or even 1st floor of Cloud, and their legacy infrastructure is what is getting replaced.
Still i am supprise GCloud ddidnt make it to the final
"Still i am supprise GCloud ddidnt make it to the final"
Google withdrew from JEDI voluntarily after employees campaigned against DoD work.
In addition, Googles hosting platform is only approved to FedRAMP moderate accreditation (https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance/fedramp/) meaning that it is currently ineligible for general purpose DoD workloads requiring high level accreditation - there are naturally ways around this but they are treated on a case-by-case basis rather than being easily accessible.
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