Mr. Bezos Goes To Washington

theodp writes "TechFlash takes a look at Amazon's evolving government cloud strategy, reporting that the company is quietly building an operation in the D.C. area ('Amazon Government Solutions') as it aims to become a key technology provider to federal and state governments and the US military. According to Input, the federal government market for cloud services is projected to grow to $800 million by 2013, and the state and local cloud market is expected to reach $635 million by that year."

Comments

Just what government spending needs

[Psyborgue]

One click buying. What could possibly go wrong there.

Re:Just what government spending needs

[jo42]

Don't forget the infinitely deep credit card known as the Federal Reserve -- that just keeps 'printing' more money by entering numbers with more zeros after them into a computer terminal deep in the bowls of the Eccles building.

Re:Just what government spending needs

[ae1294]

I was under the impression that they had to make a virgin sacrifice or something? (female virgin)

All they gotta do is enter some more zeros at a terminal? They don't even need any one's just some crummy Zero's?? DAMN I'm really surprised they don't do it more often... in fact.. i wonder if I can do this at my local bank....

anyone know?
ae

Re:Just what government spending needs

[mrmeval]

One click pwnage?

It is criminally incompetent for government to depend on a private entity for computing needs. Even for the 'unclassified' data that still allows to much access to the internal workings of government. It allows too much access to citizens private data. It allows too much dependence on a single source supplier and we have too damn many of those where there is zero competition and massive amounts of fraud and abuse. Single source suppliers are companies that have a product no one else can make. Usually this is through locking in the government to patented, proprietary solutions. There are companies lingering long after they should have died due to inefficiencies that would have killed them were they in a real marketplace.

No, but fuck no and I will recommend opposing this. There are non-proprietary solutions to cloud computing that are deployable now on the millions of government computers and servers.

Recession

[googlesmith123]

First though it's expected to plummet by 500%.

Yes I just made that number up.

So... What happens when they outsource to China?

[Colin Smith]

It's all just a cloud, and it'd be cheaper to host the servers and development teams in China.
 

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[dov_0]

The Chinese black-hats only have to get a job there then...

Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Larry Ellison used to spout off that PCs were ultimately doomed. That the Internet would allow for hosted services and remote computing power and our local computers would merely be thin clients hosting the view portion of the application.

Yet this concept never truly took off. Instead of personal computers getting lighter and thinner, they got bigger and more featureful. The exact opposite of Ellison's prognostications.

Businessweek had an article in 1996 describing the move we are seeing today to "cloud" services.
http://www.businessweek.com/1996/26/b34813.htm

And the ones who will reap the profits are still the server-side service providers. Netscape is gone, now there is Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Sun still lives on as part of Ellison's own network computing powerhouse Oracle. If someone could monetize a server-worthy version of Linux, there would be massive profits for that company as well.

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[wjh31]

with google docs and onlive, its starting to get quite viable to move everything into the cloud and just use thin clients. I can even imageing being happy with it aslong as thin clients dont become all that's available with fees for every cloud service. However the one area i dont like is storage. Yes it would be good to back stuff up in the cloud, but for sensitive documents and stuff with sentimental value, i think local storage will remain incase of loss or compromising of data on the server, or just incase the server is down when you want it. Bring on the cloud, but let me keep my harddrive

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[thetoadwarrior]

I would say Larry was right, at worst, it's just going to take a bit longer than he thought.

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[ae1294]

Yes just one more reason to take off work if the internet goes down... I think this whole cloud stuff is a good idea if run on a local server...

Over the internet? Are we really THAT insane?
ae

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[OrangeTide]

We're probably only a generation away before people own web-enabled smart phones instead of laptops and desktops. Us old timers aren't going to give up our gear, but in the future it might be ideal for average folk who just want to use the internet to communicate, shop, pay bills, read things and watch videos to migrate to a smartphone-like device.

Basically when the MySpace generation have kids, and those kids are old enough to start owning and operating electronics I think we'll see the shift.

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[dkf]

Over the internet? Are we really THAT insane?

Yes, we are. Large organizations (both private and public) are already sufficiently dependent on the internet even without the Cloud that if the 'net goes down, they're in deep trouble. Adding some Cloud to that doesn't change very much.

Of course, there's both down sides and up sides to this. The big downers are that it is potentially more expensive and you're not in control. The big up sides are that it relieves pressure on your own data center, and it's easier to trace service costs back to particular work items (this is vastly important in large organizations; smaller ones tend to have simpler finances).

Sure, with important data it is important to keep a backup somewhere else than the working copy. But that's been true for, well..., more decades than I've been programming. No change.

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[ae1294]

Yes, we are. Large organizations (both private and public) are already sufficiently dependent on the internet even without the Cloud

Well then Gee lets hope no one ever figures out they can blow up 4 or 5 buildings to totally disable our entire economy...

BOSS: "Why aren't you WORKING Jeb!"
JEB: "Sorry sir, someone blew up the internet.. I can't type up that To-DO list you needed."
BOSS: "Can't you just use paper?"
JEB: "No sir, remember when the board decided to go totally paperless last fall?"
BOSS: "No... I honestly never pay attention in those meetings."
JEB: "O ok... well then you should know they also gave me a raise and access to the company hooker."
BOSS: "O all right she's in the board room... carry on Jeb.."
JEB: "O yes... yes I will indeed sir...

ae

Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[quanticle]

Having applications hosted over the network makes things subjectively different, however. If I have local copies of my application, I'll be able to work locally with whatever data I have while I wait for the Internet connection to be restored.

If the application is hosted on the Internet, however, all work stops when the 'net connection goes down. The option of working locally for a while isn't there.

His patent covers one choice voting ...

[Alain Williams]

He has gone to explain to Obama that his one click buying patent was sufficiently broadly worded that it covers the voting system and so he wants to discuss license fees...

In two hundred years time the real reason behind the USA's multi-candidate proportional voting system will be forgotten ...

Not just Amazon

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a national lab and was told recently to do a feasibility study on moving our applications to cloud environments. It is the hot buzz word in Washington these days and it is becoming impossible to get funding for computation without throwing it around.

Interestingly enough Microsoft visited recently offering enormous amounts of time for science applications on their new Azure cloud for cheap. They also are offering serious resources to port unix/linux based science application to their cloud windows OS.

Marketing

[truthsearch]

Cloud market? They really mean VPS market. 'Cause that's all these "cloud computers" are today, quickly instantiated virtual private servers.

No service yet gives you the single endlessly expandable and distributed server instance. You still set up small servers and implement your own distributed application model, no different then buying multiple pieces of hardware. So far the "cloud" is all marketing.

Re:Marketing

[quanticle]

Doesn't Google App Engine give you something like that?

Bezos == Bozo?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only person that keep reading it as Bozo?

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[davester666]

and it's faster, because they don't have to go through China's firewall to access the data...

Maybe Re:Ellison is vidicated 20 years later

[Anonymous Coward]

Kernels rolled specifically for the processors they operate on.

Right now you get about 70% of the potential of your processor

if you have not compiled your kernel for your processor.

Core 2 / Pentium IV / Pentium III

Debian has the build systems to provide these kernels.

Another area, specific task oriented builds of the distribution.

There are too many opinions as to how things should be set up.

Multiple servers?
Virtualization of servers
Distribution choices

Some people like putting databases on one server, apache on another, and users on yet another.

Some people like virtual machines, plug-ins.

Some people just don't care. Generic's.

Some people like perl, some like python, others like c and some lisp.

This is probably how God intended man to live. To each his own. Let the clouds part where they may :)

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[phantomfive]

Does this actually worry you?

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[Auraiken]

Don't you think china would rather know how their loaned money is being spent?

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon doesn't tend to do that. They have small operations in a few countries, mostly for localization and dealing-with-banks purposes. Even in the US, they have a tendency to resist hiring lots of devs, and the ones they do hire are bright and good a communicating with others. They don't tend to do really graceless things with contractors. In short, I don't see outsourcing in the cards. And yes, I am logged in, I'm just feeling a tiny bit cowardly.

Customers Who Bought This Senator

[EnsilZah]

Also Bought...

Re:So... What happens when they outsource to China

[Anonymous Coward]

It's all just a cloud, and it'd be cheaper to host the servers and development teams in China.

Actually, no. Besides speed-of-light latency in and out of China from places where most cloud users are located (even without the packet loss everyone sees traversing the great firewall) there's also the problem that utilities and infrastructure in China are not set up to support modern datacenter power densities or connectivity requirements. You also cannot build your own infrastructure - only government-connected insiders get to build and own infrastructure.

As for development teams, language barriers are still a major issue. Cultural issues are double-edged - there is a pretty good talent pool and strong cultural norms encouraging hard work, but cutting corners (e.g. substituting sub-standard components not in the original design) for short term gain (sowing the seeds of eventual catastrophic failure) appears to be a bigger problem in China vs. the US or other offshoring locations. True for software, true for hardware (substandard, often counterfeit parts get subbed on production lines all the time, requiring expensive supervision), true for buildings (there's even a local idiom for it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_projects)