Pentagon Splits $9 Billion Cloud Contract Between 4 Firms - Slashdot

Posted by BeauHD

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  Kids, this is how political parties turn public tax money into party funds, by going through the govt contracts to private companies and then back to the party through campaign contributions.

  Every step 100% legal following the law written by the lawmakers from the very same parties getting the money.

  The only thing being argued about was which companies get to play in this round. In any other country in the world this would be called corruption.

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    Sure, just send an e-mail to [email protected] and promise them a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions and you'll get a multi billion dollar contract. American politicians are cheaply and easily bought.

  • Wrong. According to the FEC [fec.gov]:

    The Federal Election Campaign Act prohibits corporations and labor organizations from making contributions in connection with federal elections. [...] National banks and federally chartered corporations, such as federal savings and loan associations, are prohibited from making contributions in connection with state and local as well as federal elections.

    Separately, from the same source, and to protect against precisely the kind of thing you describe:

    Federal government contractors are prohibited from making contributions or expenditures in connection with federal elections.

    • Re:

      Ever hear of Citizens United Court Case ? Also the source of contributions do not need to be disclosed. So a company can send money to a subsidiary or a related company which can then bribe^H^H^H^H^H donate.

      Some US politicians have been trying to force disclosure of the real source of campaign contributions, but the bill keeps getting blocked. Why would someone what to end their own personal gravy train.

      • I see that you skipped right over the first quote I provided. The FEC clarifies this [fec.gov] for you:

        Since corporate contributions are already prohibited, the government contractor ban applies primarily to contributions from a partnership (or a limited liability company that has not elected to be treated as a corporation for federal tax purposes) that has entered into or is bidding on a government contract.

        You're also confused about the Citizens United case, which specifically does not apply to donations to politicians, parties, or their campaigns. Donations to those groups cannot be anonymous -- you can search them [fec.gov] online if you want.

        The problem is not what you don't know, but what you know that just ain't so.

    • Re:

      So you are saying that in the near future, Google, Oracle, Microsoft and Amazon will definitely, 100%, NOT make any campaign contributions to either parties?

      Hands up, anybody believe this will happen?

      • Re:

        Yep, those of us who live in the real world believe that.

        https://www.forbes.com/sites/r... [forbes.com]... "Microsoft also announced it would change the name of its PAC to the Microsoft Corporation Stakeholders Voluntary PAC in order to make it more clear that it is funded, like all corporate PACs, by voluntary contributions from employees."

        https://www.opensecrets.org/or... [opensecrets.org]... "NOTE: Organizations themselves cannot contribute to candidates and party committees."

        How much do you think those companies have donated to pol

      • Re:

        It doesn't need to be money. Support can come in other ways. When I worked for an aerospace company we were advised each election which candidate would be working for our best interests. It is all perfectly legal when 20 thousands employees are influenced by their employer.

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      Right but they are entirely free to engage in as much 'issue advertising' as they like and our respective parties have carefully carved out identitarian positions around a handful of especially animating issues in response - precisely so those big players can effectively campaign for them.

      This is what the 'take the money out of politics, let's do more campaign finance rules' people don't understand. You will never take money out of politics because living in a society is fundamentally about politics, and m

      • Re:

        Lol. lmao.

        You'll never get all money out of politics but you can surely as hell do better than the status quo in the US.

        Look at other countries with more sensible regulations and public campaign financing. It's not perfect but sure as hell better than "Exxon 'donated' $100k each to a bunch of senators and they voted for their interests". This is known but doesn't matter because what are you gonna do, vote against them, and thus for a guy who's even more bought?

• Cloud works best when you lock in to one, now they will spread this across four services lowering security and increasing cost.
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  • Because commercial monopolies work so well.

    This is moderately good news for America's defenses, actually. They used to have ironclad "second source" rules for strategic goods. That went out the window somewhere on the path to ever more graft and corruption. So now that idea is back, sort-of, even if only as an appeasing gesture to the "tech giants" meaning those have too much power and won't abide just one of them taking it all.

    As to "works best", well, what does nine milliard dollar buy these days?

    If I was in charge I'd build my own "cloud" for h

    • Re:

      Excuse me, including Oracle in the lot isn't going to win my vote of confidence. And MS's idea of security is get people to use bullet points.

    • Re:

      No, S_Stout is right, this is fucking stupid. When the government uses multiple sources, they source the same thing from multiple vendors. So if they need bullets, they get the same bullets from two vendors. Imagine if they said "We need ammo for our M4 rifles" and went out and got four suppliers, all who provided them with different caliber rounds so they had to have 4 different, incompatible M4 rifles now. That is basically what they have done here. Instead of one consistent platform you now have to deal

      • Re:

        I didn't read anything that implied every single solution developed in this program needs to be spread over all four clouds. It's quite likely that if you are working on one application for one department, you will be dealing exclusively or at least primarily with one of the cloud providers.

        It is little different to any large enterprise. My company (25k+ employees) is primarily an Azure shop, but we do use products in AWS from time to time. I wouldn't be surprised if Google cloud and Oracle are somewhere in

        • Re:

          Then, again going back to the point the AC tried to make, you don't gain anything. Those apps are locked into those cloud providers and you are single-sourced for them. All you get is increased overall complexity for the total environment. The better choice, from a DR and vendor independence point of view, would be to make those apps multi-cloud, but then you greatly increase the engineering requirements, especially trying to deal with 4 different providers.

      • Re:

        I disagree, going with only 1 would create too much lock-in, like if they chose Boeing to be the sole supplier of all future aircraft. In fact they do the opposite and wisely so.

        Any single project is going to settle on one or the other, not try to juggle all 4 (except maybe a few cornerstones like email and authentication). This way new projects will have a choice which preserves competition, and at least existing projects could migrate by solving 'only' the technical hurdles, without being administrativ

    • Re: Because commercial monopolies work so well.

      This isn't going to be meaningfully different than the government building it themselves. They are just taking advantage of the workforces and existing products of these companies. The government will almost certainly be given their own private clouds within these providers whenever that is requested. Classified documents won't just be sitting in the same S3 storage servers that the public uses.

  • Re:

    I'm not so sure about that - AWS has some key features, as does GCP. For example, anything to do with video is probably best done in AWS, anything to do with AI is probably best done in GCP. Anything Windows-y probably is easiest in Azure. I guess the government has some Oracle databases, which would probably best park in Oracle (shame they won't re-architect to make use of something better, but there you go). Running some services in one cloud, with others in another isn't really much of a problem, and it

  • Re:

    Not for very large enterprises. It usually isn't feasible for a large company or government to constrain themselves to one cloud. The most glaring reason is it limits the third party vendors they can use, since some vendors only host their services on one cloud. It also limits the number of services they have access to, since there isn't 100% parity across all cloud providers.

    The Pentagon is large enough that they will reach a high level of scale on all four platforms. Most likely you will still see individ

• What next, they'll hire 9 women to produce a baby in one month?

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    +1 Funny...in an odd way

• This is so stupid that it is either fake, or the end of the US.

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    Nah, don't worry! Nothing worse will happen than your getting a $9B web site that works crappily because it is distributed among the worst features of four cloud providers blaming each other.

• • Re:

    And you think on-premise servers aren't hackable? Have you seen the amount of money companies spend on security specialists for their on-premise servers? Have you seen those DMZs and proper MFA? Nope, neither have I. Have you seen those SQL Server 2008 servers with encryption turned off, still humming away in those on-prem closets? Yep, I certainly have. Security is a "nice to have," an afterthought, when companies host on-prem.

    In a recent pen test, a security firm my company contracted, sent everyone a phi

• If these companies know they are guarantied a share, why would they compete for best deal for us in the future? And multi-provider redundancy is only sensible if that was the engineered plan.
• Oracle cloud? Really people? Can't we just use the other three and call it a day?

  • Re:

    I agree with the sentiment, but the truth is that Oracle Cloud is probably a pretty decent option for hosting Oracle databases and other Oracle software.

• Great, so now I, as a taxpayer, have to pay to develop four versions of everything, and the added cost of integrating it all.

  They should have agreed to split the contract between any cloud providers that provided standardized API, and made it easy to move workloads between vendors.

  At least that would have benefited everyone by reducing lock-in

• WTF is that? Has to be awarded due to some lobbying/political rather than merits.

• Four companies to create one complex system. What could possibly go wrong? Everything.

• Not "between." "Among." Between = 2; Among >2.

• And the companies that provide the most standards compliant cloud service win.

  We can dream.

• Oracle's evil court tactics paid off, it got a chunk of the contract. The crying brat got its way, making it even brattier.

  • Re:

    Correction, it was Amazon, not Oracle. My bad.

    Reminds of the Simpsons episode where Lisa decided to screw up a BBQ party to protest eating meat. Her mom shouted, "Bart, stop that now!" When Bart pointed out the error, mom replied, "Sorry, habit."

• technology had changed to the extent that the old contract, which was awarded to Microsoft, no longer met DOD's needs.

  Does anyone know the specific reasons for the change? Or is it so secret they'd have to kill you for revealing it?