Pentagon's $10bn JEDI decision 'risky for the country and democracy,' says AWS CEO Jassy Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy faced the press yesterday at Amazon's re:Invent conference in Las Vegas, and there was one thing above all else that journos wanted to discuss. Why was Amazon heading to court to challenge the US Department of Defense's decision to award its $10bn winner-takes-all JEDI IT project to Microsoft …
Seems odd to sue over NOT being awarded a contract. Do such people think they are owed ?
And like it or not, a governing party will have views on different companies, which will factor into choosing providers. Just like say, a future Labour government might avoid Capita. The American constitutional imperative of 'Fairness' seems to have addled corporations' tiny little minds.
For the record, I dislike Microsoft more than Amazon.
Does it? It seems pretty natural to me.
If you think you've been discriminated against on grounds of race or sex, you can sue. This is the same thing at a corporate level.
A future Labour government might avoid Capita, but Capita could sue under similar circumstances. At least, assuming EU competition laws are still in effect when it happens. Presumably those would be one of the first things to go, in the event of a Corbyn Brexit; not sure about Boris's version, but I suspect that he too wants to be able to award contracts to his cronies without interference from courts.
And given the very public nature of hostilities by the POTUS towards Bezo, and the cramming of key positions with sycophantic lackeys...
It's pretty easy to argue that the AWS bid wasn't given fair consideration according to the (presumed) rules that are on the Pentagon books. That's what they're suing for, they think they missed out on a lucrative contract because the Pentagon defined rules were broken.
"If you think you've been discriminated against on grounds of race or sex, you can sue. This is the same thing at a corporate level."
As far as I know, there is US legislation that inhibits or prohibits companies from getting government contracts if they do not meet certain criteria with regard to eg gender/race pay discrimination. I'm not sure if that also includes things like worker safety, nor if it applies at state or federal level or indeed would be applicable to an army contract.
But in principle it is perfectly OK for a government to adjudicate tenders based on other things besides the quality of the product, as long as it's not in itself discriminatory. Amazon might indeed have the best product, but maybe MS had a good-enough product for cheaper. Maybe Amazon has more lock-in. Maybe US army has more confidence in MS's future development plans than in Amazon's (it's a multi-year project so sensible to look at it holistically not just current snapshot). And so on, and so on.
A suspicious bastard might also suspect that Amazon might want it's lawyers to get a look at subpoenaed records that could include Microsoft sensitive commercial and technical data. Of course such data should be 'chinese-walled' but, who knows what actually does happen?
Seems odd to sue over NOT being awarded a contract. Do such people think they are owed ?
Different rules can apply with public procurement to private. So public needs to appear to be fair. So RFPs end up with litigation avoidance in mind, so list of mandatory requirements, SLAs and evaluation criteria. Then responses get scored, and the best bid wins. Downside is the scores are commercially sensitive, so generally not disclosed outside of litigation. Which could be a ploy here, ie finding out why Amazon lost.
Which can all be very frustrating, ie not being able to include 'nice to haves' because that can be harder to evaluate & compare to other bids. So you can't win a bid by including a feature the bid didn't ask for, generally. I suspect Microsoft won though because it could offer a more complete package of bare-bones hosting and services.
Companies sue when they think the probable return is higher than the probable cost, or possibly based on the average rate of return if they're looking at a pool of lawsuits.
Here "return" will include intangibles such as PR (a lawsuit is an effective way to get some extra advertising in the press) and soothing the executive egos.
With the amount of money at stake in the JEDI contract,1 this lawsuit is basically a high-risk, high-return investment for AWS. Amazon has cash to burn, so why not? I mean, why except ethics and not looking like a bunch of whining children.
(And JFTR, I have no reason to prefer Microsoft or Amazon for this contract. I don't particularly care for either organization, and I don't expect the project to go well. My feelings are "at least it's not Oracle".)
1And, let's face it, there will be cost overruns. There are always cost overruns. And who knows if the thing will ever meet its original criteria; most huge IT projects fail.
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Azure and almost all its infrastructure is based an an OS / Hypervisor image from a single manufacturer.
AWS is a bolt together of many many tool and systems - both in house and external.
Guess which is way way simpler to user and generally performs better? Clue - it isn't AWS.
Me too.
AWS seemed a seamless single solution and Azure seems to drop into a range of interfaces depending on when that bit got written. The Azure training does emphasise that the primary interface to Azure is powershell and any web interface will lag behind and be less complete so it's not entirely unexpected. AWS seems to have a much more complete web experience for the administrator
I much prefer the AWS approach of creating VMs secure and then opening them up to the internet rather than the Azure method of creating them on the internet and then closing them down.
Jon
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"Based on my experience with running production services on both, I'd guess that they actually tried to use both platforms before choosing."
Correct - the DoD did try both and have been moving most new projects to AWS in the last 2-3 years.
For small scale projects where you want to operate in a similar way to your on-premises Windows environment, Azure offers the least challenges.
As soon as you want to operate larger scale, heavily automated IaaS services, the tools AWS provides are significantly ahead of their competition outside a few specialist areas.
And this is reflected in market share.
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I agree about the documentation comments in your post, but the rest is rubbish. AWS at scale is precisely what blows Azure out of the water.
And monitoring - I guess the main thing here is maybe MS does have better monitoring, cos it is needed as Azure constantly drops to its knees (check out independent outage stats). I've been on customer sites so many times when Azure has failed, but what is interesting is that people seem to have accepted/got used to that poor level of service from MS
"You're referring to the success of govcloud, which is really a credit to the Amazon sales force but not a reflection of AWS quality at all."
Yes....I was referring to GovCloud because the DoD/JEDI will be based in GovCloud. For the IaaS side of GovCloud, AWS is literally years ahead of Azure.
The examples you use for failings around AWS are valid BUT are Microsoft really any better across the board in any of the things you mention? Most of the examples you give are relatively new services (i.e. less than 2 years old and rapidly evolving on both platforms) and as such documentation/tools/directions change BUT for like-for-like services, AWS tends to have better documentation/tools because people are actually using it.
"Errr, Patrick Stewart was in Star Trek, not B5."
It's a long running joke on the topic of JEDI hereabouts - there hasn't been a Star Wars picture used yet, IIRC. Initially it played on the Star Wars/Star Trek conflation by those barbarians that don't care to know the difference, and now brings in B5. *We* all know the difference, and who starred in what (hence the comment about Sir Patrick - who doesn't have a grave to spin in yet!), but sometimes pretend not to.
There - have I killed that joke sufficiently? I can draw some diagrams if you want :-)
With the sizable number of servers found "wide open" with confidential information on them I have zero trust in AWS on something as sensitive as our national security. It can be argued that these server setups are the responsibility of their owners but given that AWS takes absolutely zero responsibility for guiding those customers and "securing by default" leaves me with stunned every time we read about another server found wide open. AWS is classic Amazon really. They will do all they can to sell you a product. But taking responsibility for the quality of that product is only done when you force them to do so. They will never, and I think this is literally "corporate culture" take an active role to prevent faulty products. And frankly, with a contract that has this much importance, the track record at AWS over security problems tells me exactly why they should never be given a Pentagon contract.
Ok, a few facts:
* When you create an S3 bucket, the default is NO public access.
* when you create a VPC, the default is NO internet access
* when you create an EC2 instance, it’s default security group allows NO inbound access from the internet
* when you create an IAM user or role, by default there are NO permissions defined - hence a default deny
Of course, people can explicitly change these defaults (just like an on-premises firewall can be changed to allow internet connectivity), but that’s the customer. There are an increasing number of tools that also encourage users to think before enabling public access to these things.
You can define IAM policies for users that prevent them making these changes; you can configure services to monitor and react to unwanted changes; you can audit exactly who/when/what was changed.
Finally, AWS never forces a product sale; by its nature, pretty much everything is self service and PAYG; if you don’t like it, stop paying. Makes a nice change from multi-year contracts with penalties for early termination!
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