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Oracle Challenges Pentagon's $10 Billion Cloud Computing Contract (theregister.co.uk)
Oracle has filed an official complaint with the U.S. government over plans to award the Pentagon's lucrative cloud contract to a single vendor. Rebecca Hill writes via The Register: The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which has a massive scope, covering different levels of secrecy and classification across all branches of the military, will run for a maximum of 10 years and is worth a potential $10 billion. In spite of this pressure from vendors and the tech lobby -- as well as concerns from Congress -- the US Department of Defense (DoD) refused to budge, and launched a request for proposals (RFP) at the end of last month. Oracle is less than impressed with the Pentagon's failure to back down, and this week filed a bid protest to congressional watchdog the Government Accountability Office asking for the RFP to be amended.
In the protest, the database goliath sets out its arguments against a single vendor award -- broadly that it could damage innovation, competition, and security. Reading between the lines, it doesn't want either of Amazon or Microsoft or Google to get the whole pie to itself, and thus endanger Oracle's cosiness with Uncle Sam. Summing up its position in a statement to The Register, Oracle said that JEDI "virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more" at a time when cloud technology is changing at an unprecedented pace.
In the protest, the database goliath sets out its arguments against a single vendor award -- broadly that it could damage innovation, competition, and security. Reading between the lines, it doesn't want either of Amazon or Microsoft or Google to get the whole pie to itself, and thus endanger Oracle's cosiness with Uncle Sam. Summing up its position in a statement to The Register, Oracle said that JEDI "virtually assures DoD will be locked into legacy cloud for a decade or more" at a time when cloud technology is changing at an unprecedented pace.
I fundamentally dislike Oracle. Its an exploitative company that functions purely on ensnaring companies into deals that are far too costly then using legal shenanigans to stop them to leave.
BUT, they are right here. Giving the whole contract , all ten billion of it, to a single contractor (And lets be clear here, its either AWS or Azure. Google are capable, but they dont have the govt mojo to compete in this space) is straight up monopoly building, and it creates a single point of vunerability to the DODs systems. By splitting things up over multiple providers, it enhances competition, and divides up responsibility in a way better suited to national security.
And after all, they could still write "NO ORACLES ALLOWED" in it, right. (Well probably not, but hey)
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
We need to drill deeper than simply reporting on Oracle's protest, and the politics behind it.
An independent body of security experts should study the Pentagon's use of the cloud in the first place. Simply by moving to cloud computing, the Pentagon is revealing that they underestimate the cyber espionage capabilities of enemy states, and as in the case of Islamic State or Al Qaeda, stateless enemies.
The same independent body should also study vulnerabilities inherent in military use of the cloud. In an all out war, the enemy first tries to neutralize the command and control infrastructure of their enemy (us). Simply by using the cloud, we are offering the enemy a single neck to chop off, connecting the brain to the body. A secure military force requires so much redundancy, that the enemy has too many necks to chop off to be a feasible strategy.
I suspect the benefit to splitting things up may be obvious enough that I don't need to state it. On the other hand, over the years I've put a lot of thought into why companies use these clouds, and particularly AWS.
Years ago I developed a small private cloud using a lot of technology I designed and architected myself, with coding help from my employees and a contractor for the UI. It was mostly about storage, and some really nifty ways of managing virtual machines, but the main cost was storage. Multiple people asked me why we didn't use AWS for storage, so even after I had already looked into AWS I double checked a couple more times. What I found was that their storage was MUCH more expensive than some very solid, very flexible storage built from standard open source Linux storage components (cLVM, etc) and some 16-bay Supermicro chassis. AWS was super expensive for storage, and for virtual machines. So why are so many companies using them so much? Years later, I think I have a couple of answers.
There are a few reasons, but one is the level of integration of advanced things like auto-scale groups. Even getting just a load balancer working PROPERLY and configuring a static cluster of web servers is tricky normally. More often than not, the server clusters I see people deploy aren't actually clusters at all. They are a screwed up hybrid of a true cluster and a bunch of independent mirrors, which breaks things. AWS gives you a solid cluster in a few clicks. You can the easily save your entire cluster setup to your git repo as a Cloud Formation template.
The big clouds aren't the best way to get storage, they aren't the best way to run virtual machines, they aren't the best way to run databases. The magic is the integration - with a few clicks you have all the right DNS entries pointed to your new cluster of web servers, which talk to your DB cluster through the Lamda functions, all backed by the magic storage in a seamless way. With a beautiful API for programming it all. That's where the value is, how Amazon brings all these different things together seamlessly.
Breaking your operations up across a bunch of cloud providers meana giving up this seamless integration, duplicating whole data centers to another physical location with a few clicks, and haing everything still work.
If you're not going to take advantage of how everything is put together, you may as well save a few bucks and have a rack full of Supermicro gear on premises.
This is the first news about Oracle doing something that I think might not be evil that I have seen.
Being right is not the same as being good. Oracle is right, but for reasons of pure self-interest. They got a late start in cloud services, lack scale, and are still sucking hind tit, so they have no hope of getting a big winner-takes-all contract. If they can force the DoD to break it up, they have a good chance of getting some portion today, and even more in coming years.
Bad memories die hard, and your solutions trainwrecked Oregon's healthcare website when other states were able to accomplish more for far less and in a far more timely manner.
Good thing I'm not in congress, I'd find any way I could to prevent you from bidding on a contract that was critical for our national defense.
Just get lost already, and let the companies that know what they're doing get the job done.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"