Microsoft VP Asks AWS To 'Stand Down' On JEDI Cloud Protests (crn.com) 74
A Microsoft executive urged Amazon Web Services to "stand down on its litigation" opposing the award of the military's lucrative JEDI commercial cloud transformation contract, arguing the ongoing legal and administrative challenges are keeping the best tools out of the hands of U.S. warfighters. From a report: The statement from Frank Shaw, Microsoft's corporate vice president for communications, came in response to Amazon's latest attempt to compel a re-evaluation of the potentially $10 billion contract won by Microsoft -- a protest filed Monday directly with the Pentagon. The Defense Department's "decision to source a Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract to deliver the latest advancements in enterprise cloud could be a great step forward," Shaw said. "But only if Amazon gets out of the way." Shaw repeated Microsoft's now-common refrain against AWS: the cloud market leader bid too high, and it is now looking for a "re-do." "This latest filing -- filed with the DoD this time -- is another example of Amazon trying to bog down JEDI in complaints, litigation and other delays designed to force a do-over to rescue its failed bid," he said.
Sneaky argument (Score:5, Insightful)
That's right! Our tools are the best tools and yours suck! Take that, Amazon!
Seriously what is this, kindergarten?
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Re:Sneaky argument (Score:4, Insightful)
That's right! Our tools are the best tools and yours suck! Take that, Amazon!
Seriously what is this, kindergarten?
You only have to view it that way if you don't immunize yourself against marketing.
Imagine the military's current primary weapon is insulting words. Two competing companies named Stick and Stones offer their wares to the military. Sticks produces the winning bid and Stones opposes this. Years of litigation go by, with Stones continually opposing the implementation of Sticks' offerings. This argument keeps the best tools out of the military's hands. Is that Sticks? Is that Stones? Is that physical weapons in general? Up to you how to parse the marketing speak.
Full inception: are cloud products the best ones for the military?
Re:Sneaky argument (Score:4, Funny)
Won't somebody think of the soliders???
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I don't know about them, but somebody should think of the soldiers.
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Amazon does this with everyone, but even more predominantly in the consumer market.
They'll try and charge you $30 to ship a single product in 3-5 days, but charge $12/mo for prime which ships in 2-3 days, or even next day.
The people in the warehouses are packing boxes. The prime truck is rolling down my street daily.
They could charge you $12 to ship a single product in 3 days, but no -- double the cost.
For both Amazon and MS, the people, the servers, the infrastructure -- it's all mostly in place anyway in
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You have a barter notion of business, back to econ 101 for you.
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My co-workers previous job was network support for Azure, his first comment when he saw that the contract went to Azure was, "They're going to regret that." Later he said, "When I left the Azure government cloud was held together with duct tape and prayer."
I do physical security (key cards, alarms, cameras, etc.) and have worked on both MS and Amazon data centers. Unless there's been a radical change in the last six years the AWS installations are an order of magnitude more secure and far better thought-o
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I never said that I have experience comparing cloud offerings, I specifically said, " I'm not a cloud user or programmer". What I do have experience in is physical security, and I've set up, monitored and maintained the systems in DCs both at Amazon and MS. Azure's physical security, site monitoring, and alarm response are mediocre at best. The AWS physical security system is the second-best security deployment that I have ever worked on (yes, I'm patting myself on the back), which means that it's one of
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What you say may be true. But the elephant in the room is that the military falls under the executive branch of the federal government. And the current occupant of the Oval Office, and head of that executive branch, has decided that he personally hated Jeff Bezos. That would not be a massive problem in of itself. No one has to personally like someone to do business with their company. But this occupant has made his antipathy towards Bezos into a very public attack campaign; and has openly called for ot
Re: Sneaky argument (Score:3)
Is using government power to kick Bezos in the teeth ok? No, assuming that's what happened.
Was using his billions to attack a notoriously prickly man you want to do business with a smart move? Lol, no.
Is Amazon the best choice over Azure? I don't know but I do know if AWS's bod
Re: Sneaky argument (Score:2)
The translation I read is: "My very nice annual bonus rests on this project starting up this year and continuing better bonuses rest on it going well every year. You are messing it up for me!!!"
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Seriously what is this, kindergarten?
This is "business", a.k.a. "no argument to dishonest to allow us making a buck"...
Re: Sneaky argument (Score:2)
I don't think it's necessarily intended to convey what you're suggesting. Pretty sure it's just saying the government is being prevented from using industry standard best practices (cloud) by delaying the implementation of a project whose bid is over and decided.
If you agree with Amazon that Trump unfairly influenced the bid, then of course this argument doesn't have much standing. But if you think Trump being Trump is simply that, then Amazon is holding up defense projects.
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Ultimately, the military needs this software to be delivered in a timely manner, and if Amazon doesn't wake up and withdraw their legal challenges, the President will end up using the Defense Authorization Act to order Microsoft to produce the software, and Amazon not to.
Trump will eat it up, he gets a free win with his name on it, all the military has to do is ask.
You can't go to court and force the military to use your stuff. The contract process is not their only procurement tool. Only Congress and the E
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Seriously what is this, kindergarten?
No, that's how business is done in the public sector. Every major contract award is protested if the losing party has any experience in the industry. Even the smallest fish can lodge a protest and prevail.
I'm serious. This is the normal process. Some protests take years to resolve.
Does It Ever Payoff to Protest a Government Bid/Contract Award? [periscopeholdings.com]
Critical GAO Bid Protest Deadlines and Timeline [government...igator.com]
This is a seriously lucrative business if you're good at it.
Communications VPs (Score:2)
Re:Communications VPs (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, MS claiming "we are better" is an extraordinary claim that would need extraordinary proof. Not saying they could be better, but available evidence and history of their products indicates they are rather on the "just barely good enough if you have a high pain-threshold" level of "quality".
For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:3, Insightful)
In general, I prefer AWS but the reality is that there's not enough functional difference in performance to justify the grossly higher costs of using Amazon over Azure if you're not already committed to them and want to avoid migrating. AWS is 3-5x more costly for even large businesses and really offers no significant advantage, and is arguably less secure. The US government, absent an overwhelming benefit for additional cost, was always going to pick the cheaper option (as anyone who used 3M combat earplugs can tell you) and that was Microsoft... Amazon overbid and lost and now they're using their financial and legal weight to bog down the process for a second chance. It's as frivolous as lawsuits get.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
That was a lot of typing just to say you have a biased opinion and no experience working with the DoD...
And the suggestion that Amazon is somehow a more altruistic and less profit oriented company than Microsoft is one of the most amusingly naive things I've ever heard.
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2, Insightful)
In what way is Amazon better to justify a significantly higher price than Microsoft?
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I can't speak to your expertise, but as a physical security professional I've worked on security for data centers for both systems. Both groups are building DCs quite literally as fast they can pour cement, but only AWS includes the physical security plant in the initial scope of work. AWS also has the policies and procedures in place to secure highly classified data (which is why they have the CIA contract), they have a Security Operations Center dedicated to the data centers and US Citizen personnel spe
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2)
My experience is as a long time AWS enterprise customer on some big projects. Their support is trash, the rep I paid for made it very clear his job is to blow me off, his boss made that clear to me as well, you can't dispute billing, you can't get real help with anything, physical server problems ar
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Microsoft might provide a different level of service to the government than they do to enterprise.
Remember when the aircraft carrier had to get towed back to port because the new Windows crashed? MS had a whole team of engineers working on that within minutes, and it got fixed and didn't happen again.
This software is so important, it is a no-brainer that regardless of the financials in the proposals, the military is going to select one of their historical partners to build it, not the big corp that now want
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Yeah, I'm thinking that a contract with the US government probably isn't going to play out like that.
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Microsoft is pretty trustworthy here. The $10 billion is small potatoes compared to the small percent of the military contracts they'll get going forward. See also how they didn't screw the government over when it was running warships on NT.
Microsoft tends to know that sucking up to big governments is in their long term financial interest.
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2)
Imagine having a total command systems crash with enemy fighters and missiles incoming.
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That was Win98 (or 95?), a technical error where it had to be rebooted every 28 days or similar because the uptime clock overflowed. It's unclear how many systems were directly controlled by it.
Look, bugs sneak in. That's a thing. Esp. if you have an idea for the use-case (people turn off their computer at night) that turns out to be false.
But the point is, MS tries for the government. They know that even the 800lbs gorilla has to respect the guys with the guns.
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2)
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Interesting. Thanks for looking it up.
Yeah, a full OS isn't probably necessary for missiles and steering on a warship.I like to think the government has gotten more sophisticated in acquiring technology since then
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Re:For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:4, Interesting)
As someone who works with both AWS and Azure as an ISV vendor, one of the issues I have is that every time I have to complete a task in Azure, it seems the process has changed to do the job. The documentation is often poor, with links in an English document sometimes leading to Chinese documents, etc. Now, my experience may be unusual as I tend to work in the less used areas of each vendor's offerings, but a key consideration is how effective people can be at getting their jobs done. Manpower is a large factor in why people use the cloud, and if one offering results in tasks taking longer to complete, then this is a significant factor. AWS has a much larger pool of talent that is familiar with their offerings, and can leverage them quickly, allowing projects to be completed faster. This can easily offset the cost differential in many situations between the cloud offerings.
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I was able to achieve my certification with AWS without paying for any training from AWS (and only $10 to a third party), have built offerings that are sold through both the Azure and AWS marketplaces, and work routinely with product groups at both AWS and Azure (Oh look, I have a call in 20 minutes with the Azure MySQL offering team). Now, my perspective is colored by the fact that I'm working with ISV publishing tools, which have very poor documentation (actually for both), but I overall find the amount
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2)
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I find Amazon's documentation to be pretty poor. Often, the first few results are for deprecated solutions, and Amazon doesn't go back and add a "check out this more recent version" link at the top.
I'm thinking about migrating away from AWS just because I find it so expensive to make sure I'm not getting trapped in a 5-year-old EOL solution.
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Where are you getting 3-5x more costly? What services?
I did a cost comparison about 18 months ago and found that AWS was within 10% of the cost of Azure. AWS beat out Azure on some services, but Azure was slightly less expensive on balance. At the time, we felt that AWS' longer history in the market was worth the slightly higher price.
Running Windows VPSes was the only place we saw a significant cost advantage that Azure had over AWS.
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From pricing out several large, though definitely not JEDI scale, service contracts for the DoD over the last couple years.
If you're already committed to Microsoft services and have any intent upon a hybridized strategy, the costs are significantly in Microsoft's favor and only increase with scale.
That said, even if we're talking about your 10% example that translates to $1,000,000,000 on a $10 billion contract so even a few percentage points in Microsoft's favor would be more than enough to tip the scales
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Why do you say that "AWS is 3-5x more costly". If I for example compare a T3 from aws with 16GB ram, it seems to cost about the same as a similar vm at Azure.
Do Azure really have better prices for vm hosting?
I would like to change away from aws, but all my calculations for hosting, seems to show that Azure is a tiny tiny bit more expensive.
Re: For once, I agree with Microsoft (Score:2)
The government doesn't pay retail.
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I wouldn't call a contract award protest lawsuit frivolous. That's how business is done in the public sector.
Here is one example, not at all inclusive, of protests: GAO Bid Protests [gao.gov].
In response (Score:2)
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
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There's a difference between Amazon and the Orange Idiot breaking laws.
ooh, what a winning argument! (Score:2)
"I really think you should just give me that boat, it's dry in the showroom."
"you don't have that 60-inch 8K big screen on, and I should really have it."
"Your Honor, even if I did kill those 30 people, it's a nice day, and if you let me go free, we can both have the afternoon off."
Soldiers (Score:2)
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He's an executive, his position is redundant by definition.
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Warfighters sounds like the kind of mealy mouthed bullshit that Carlin would use as an example of soft language in one of his bits. People who write like that ought to be made redundant.
Indeed. But Carlin was about honesty and seeing clearly (and then making fun of the abysmal state of things). This person is about making a buck no matter what, i.e. part of the abysmal state of things.
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Covid (Score:3)
Well I for one commend the Microsoft VP for not saying to stand down because of COVID.
Summarization (Score:1)
Bruh. Could you, like, not?
Exactly (Score:2)
the same argument Amazon would be saying right now, had the contract been awarded to MS. With such an absurd amount of money, it was obvious there would be complaints filled, no matter the winner of the bid.
And keeping those billions of $... (Score:2)
... out of our pockets.
Hands off Bezos!
I'm not a fan of the winner-take-all concept (Score:2)
The other issue is that these single vendor type contracts typically result in higher costs for the government.
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Having systems spread across cloud providers would actually be far more expensive, due to having to tailor each system to a different cloud provider, and having to pay data egress charges on all of it for each system to talk to each other. And maintaining connections to multiple clouds be it via VPN or direct attachment service (AWS DirectConnect and the like).
Having one API to target for systems management is a massively better place to be than having to determine "Oh, is this on Azure, GCP, or AWS?" for
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There should not be a JEDI contract at all. Azure, AWS, etc should compete for each system that the DOD wants to put in the cloud. Yes, there are efficiencies to be gained by having a single vendor, however the goal of a government is not to maximize efficiency at the expense of resiliency.
The other issue is that these single vendor type contracts typically result in higher costs for the government.
Building systems to handle classified data and the associated physical security requirements is a massive and expensive pain in the ass. Why would any vendor build their physical plant and software to those standards unless they already had a massive contract to do so? Those costs get built into the bid to do the work, you don't build stuff on spec. Therefore the competition was the bidding process, and MS won. The DoD isn't going to front the massive initial capex to stand up and harden a commercial cl
of course... (Score:1)
Winner of contract selection swears contract selection was fair, and asks loser to stop appeal of not being selected.
Why not just have a headline of "Water found to be wet."
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Not going to argue the technical merits of each cloud provider, but if Trump didn't hate Bezos with such a passion, there would be far less question in anyone's mind about the outcome. Amazon would still be shouting, but not nearly as many people would be listening and saying they could well have a valid point.
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And yet, military contracting is not always decided based on the lowest price, or exact match to the spec. And the Executive may have a lot of discretion here.
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Why not just have a headline of "Water found to be wet."
Just try that on a lawyer. I bet a good one could a) find that water was not wet for the purpose at hand and b) you owe him a lot of money via his client who has suffered tremendous emotional distress from your claim.
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You may find that emotional distress is only worth a couple hundred dollars in the US.
Nice... (Score:2)
Gaslighting by Microsoft, who says Amazon can't offer the same level of innovation? Wait what? Amazon treats warehouse employees like shit? what? nevermind, fuck you Amazon.
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Compare how Amazon Fulfillment Center are treated compared to any other warehouse job in the industry. Pay, benefits, working conditions, safety, etc. are all better in the FCs than at the Walmart, Target, Kroger, FedEx, etc. Distribution Centers. If you don't believe me go ask people who actually do that job. For that matter, ask yourself why the same people come back to the FCs for the Christmas rush year after year after year, or why if it's so bad they aren't leaving to go work at those other warehou
DoD Cloud, not Government Cloud (Score:1)
Last Job (Score:1)
We had a potential client that sought us out for software, we made it through the selection process all the way to the top two. In the end they choose the other vendor. The department head for the entire US branch flew out to keep moral up after they made cuts in the prior month and to soften the blow of not making a big sale. We had a chance to ask point blank why we lost the contract when the customer actively sought us out and told us how much they wanted t
Azure is not the cloud it is Windows Server (Score:1)
Windows server running in some other location is NOT the cloud. AWS and Google are cloud as they are slicing the potato different than an aspx dev on a windows enterprise network. All companies need to get beyond the windows platform and going to Azure is not the direction. If you want the same stuff you have in corporate america then yea, go Azure.
If Microsoft really wanted Azure to be cloud they would have not tried to smash a square peg in a round hole, Windows at scale they would have just went the Li
Award protests are part of this business (Score:2)
Award protests are part of this business.
MSFT needs to start rolling with the punches. There is nothing unusual or wrong about protests like this. They happen as part of the contract award process in the public sector.
Deal with it, MSFT.