

How the CIA Partnered With Amazon and Changed Intelligence - ghosh
http://www.defenseone.com/technology/2014/07/how-cia-partnered-amazon-and-changed-intelligence/88555/#.U8LHBk_v2yY.twitter

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jrochkind1
A technical-business question: So, all the hardware is ' behind the IC’s
firewall' \-- that means, in dedicated government data centers, right? And yet
"they’ll only pay for what they use."

So... Amazon needs to build out capacity to handle expected demand with
servers that can only be used by the IC, but can only charge the IC for the
servers it's currently using?

I guess Amazon figures there's enough money in a government contract to be
worth it. It's definitely odd for 'cloud' \-- ordinarily, the whole reason
cloud resources can "scale up or down to meet the need" but still make
business sense for the host, is that the resources are aggregated across
customers. right? That's sort of what made 'the cloud' possible, resources
that could be put on the internet and aggregated across the entire customer
base.

I wonder how that's going to end up working out; perhaps there's enough IC
business that it ends up aggregating out over individual government customers
anyway. (Or will be eventually; $600 million over ten years isn't actually
that big, is it?)

Still, with a private cloud necessarily having a smaller use base than the
actual 'cloud', it seems kind of predictable that either Amazon will end up
with a smaller profit margin (or risk a negative profit margin); or the
government will be paying higher rates than the actual cloud; or the
government will sometimes find itself maxed out because Amazon was
conservative in predicting demand to save money.

Or do I have it all wrong, and these servers will be in Amazon's ordinary data
centers, the same place as the rest of AWS, but on some kind of VPN or
something? The article doesn't really give us the details (unsurprisingly).

