
Court rules against Oracle in Pentagon 'war cloud' litigation - anigbrowl
https://thehill.com/policy/technology/452811-court-rules-pentagon-can-award-10b-war-cloud-contract-later-this-summer
======
the_duke
> Oracle’s cloud infrastructure 2.0 provides significant performance and
> security capabilities over legacy cloud providers

"Legacy" cloud providers. Nice try...

On a more serious note: has anyone used Oracles cloud offerings? I've heard
they are very sub-par.

~~~
neom
In working with city governments, we occasionally run into their "cloud SOAP
apis"...

~~~
jschwartzi
Oh, SOAP, that bastion of high performance and improved efficiency.

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wstrange
I have no love for Oracle, but I do question the wisdom of awarding such a
massive contract to a single supplier.

We have one branch of government that pursues companies for anti-trust, while
another branch helps those companies cement their monopoly...

~~~
dgzl
I work for a gambling company and the bet-pool/wager-resolution process
happens with another company category called a 'tote'. For 49 of the US states
we work with one particular company because we've identified them as being
overall more competent and accurate. For the remaining state, regulations
require that we work with a company with a 'local presence' in the state.
There's only one company that fits that boundary, and they are somewhat awful
to deal with. Not only do they constantly have problems, but they're not very
responsive with business interactions. A good portion of our application
infrastructure is dedicated to just handling the special case for this one
state.

The state thinks it's doing good by forcing a monopoly for this one company
with 'local presence', but the hilarious thing is that the company is HQ in
Europe somewhere, and our preferred partner is actually US based.

~~~
rxhernandez
What state if you dont mind me asking?

~~~
dgzl
New Jersey. There's a long running joke that it's an interference point for
the Mob.

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wjsetzer
Is there anyone Oracle won't sue? I think most companies would take that as a
signal they need to improve their offerings. Oracle on the other hand says,
"Are our cloud offerings sub par? No, it's the customer who is wrong."

~~~
dllthomas
> Is there anyone Oracle won't sue?

Sure. Anyone who is not interacting with Oracle, provided they have
sufficiently few resources.

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urda
Oracle should spend less time suing competitors and focus on actually building
products for the modern world.

This is the same company that tried to damage the coding world by attempting
to copyright API's. I have no sympathy for them.

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Causality1
Good. Oracle tried and is still trying to destroy the foundation of the global
software ecosystem by copyrighting APIs. Anything that damages that company or
costs it money is a good thing.

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forgottenpass
>cloud infrastructure 2.0 provides significant performance and security
capabilities over legacy cloud providers

>secure hyperscale cloud solutions

It's just VMs and hosted services. I wanna gouge my fucking eyes out.

~~~
easytiger
cloud hysteria seems to be representative of some kind of mass amnesia about
how computers work. It is only successful because it allows business boys with
no real technical understanding to make sweeping infra changes to pad their CV

~~~
kstrauser
I babysat servers for a couple of decades. Now I can concentrate on writing
software, and some Terraform plans to glue all the components together,
instead of screwing around with hard drive failures or power supplies or
failing switch ports or [...].

If Amazon exploded tomorrow, I could rack up some white box servers and have a
customer-facing cluster running by next week. You know, I don't _want_ to do
that stuff any more, though.

~~~
specialist
Herding servers is "meh". I don't care who does it.

I am legitimately excited by new divide & conquer strategies and meshes. (And
some other stuff.)

My problem with "cloud" is the negative impact on "architecture" caused by the
resurrection of legacy "services" like message queues. It feels like the 90s
all over again. Data feeds, ETL, storage, batches, RPCs, omg just kill me.

At my last gig, one of the youngsters asked me why everything was so weird,
hard to manage. I told her "Org is stuck with mainframe worldview. We're
moving the data and we should be moving the code." Light bulbs.

~~~
easytiger
This is exactly what's happening. People are building utter nonsense software
gluing bits of total junk junk together at considerable cost.

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metaphor
This article sure did a shitty, non-existent attempt at citing its references.

From the cow's mouth, here's the original JEDI Cloud solicitation[1]--which
includes the latest amended SOO[2] and Oracle's pre-award protest[3]--and the
actual court order[4].

Doesn't seem like anyone is really talking about it either, but it's worth
noting that this isn't some gratuitous "here's $10B, we're locking ourselves
in for the next decade, go buck wild" ordeal. This ID/IQ contract has a 2-year
base with 3-, 3-, and 2-year options for the remaining years, and a maximum
$10B cap _iff_ the government exercises all options.

Here's to hoping the government doesn't royally screw themselves over by
dropping the ball on CDRLs A007 and A014.

[1]
[https://www.fbo.gov/index.php?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=386...](https://www.fbo.gov/index.php?s=opportunity&mode=form&id=3860a4f4fe9d9ffc31e722ece82a143c&tab=core&_cview=1)

[2]
[https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=845d0652768ef4a4749231d39a...](https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=845d0652768ef4a4749231d39ab778d7)

[3]
[https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=6cd8017d52d2b832855c41fb74...](https://www.fbo.gov/utils/view?id=6cd8017d52d2b832855c41fb7405e4ed)

[4] [https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-
bin/show_public_doc?2018cv...](https://ecf.cofc.uscourts.gov/cgi-
bin/show_public_doc?2018cv1880-99-0)

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Tehchops
Oracle poached a lot of AWS employees when it was first getting its cloud
offering off the ground.

Looks like cargo-culting has its limits.

~~~
wmf
Oracle appears to be ahead of IBM Cloud who poached almost nobody.

~~~
unixhero
True, except IBM just poached all of Redhat.

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SteveNuts
I guess Oracle finally found someone they can't mess with.

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jascii
To bad, I wanted to sue Oracle for not hiring me.

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trilila
“But multiple Republican lawmakers and groups have raised concerns that the
JEDI contract was built specifically with AWS in mind, raising concerns over
market competition and unfair treatment. “

I am from east Europe. I know corruption when i see it. Suddenly if Oracle is
left out of the game, up they pop with unfairness and other smoke grenades for
the unaware.

Also as a technical person, integration at this scale between two providers
can be a PITA exercise. Best to chose one.

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zigzaggy
Predictable result. I’ve never seen a protest go well for any company. You can
win these protests and still lose the work.

The best case scenario is you win the protest and have to rebid the whole
thing again. You’ll still probably end up losing. Now you walk away with more
money spent, more exposure due to public court records, and a customer who’s
pissed off.

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _I’ve never seen a protest go well for any company_

Went well for SpaceX, which won access to Air Force contracts through the
courts. (It’s now re-litigating [1].)

In any case, this is commercial litigation. Not protesting _per se_.

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-
lawsuit/musk...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-space-spacex-
lawsuit/musks-spacex-sues-u-s-air-force-over-rocket-building-contracts-
filings-idUSKCN1SS2ST)

~~~
jsperson
Probably the biggest one ever - Boeing successfully protested the awarding of
the tanker contract to NG/Airbus [1]

[1] [https://www.industryweek.com/public-policy/us-gao-upholds-
bo...](https://www.industryweek.com/public-policy/us-gao-upholds-boeings-
protest-over-tanker-contract)

edit: spelling

~~~
oaiey
Except that this was with politics and America first politics involved.

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chipperyman573
I have an extension that clears any visible "sticky" element on the screen and
I had to activate it THREE TIMES over the course of reading the article. Each
time the removed element covered a portion of the article, preventing me from
reading it. What a frustrating website to use.

------
TomMckenny
>Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) on Thursday sent a letter to President Trump’s
national security adviser, John Bolton, asking the White House to delay the
contract over concerns the procurement process has been unfair and biased
toward Amazon.

A pork barrel military may not be a good idea. One that punishes political
critics might even be worse.

------
hn_throwaway_99
With the current administration, despite accusations of the contract
originally being designed "with AWS in mind", I'd take a 99-1 bet this goes to
Microsoft. No way Trump will let this go to Bezos' company. And I myself find
it incredibly sad how the fact that I think that will happen, with no or muted
outrage, doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

~~~
johnvanommen
> With the current administration, despite accusations of the contract
> originally being designed "with AWS in mind", I'd take a 99-1 bet this goes
> to Microsoft. No way Trump will let this go to Bezos' company. And I myself
> find it incredibly sad how the fact that I think that will happen, with no
> or muted outrage, doesn't surprise me in the slightest.

GovCloud is AWS and Azure right?

I don't understand why JEDI would be exclusively one provider.

~~~
metaphor
> _GovCloud is AWS and Azure right?_

Nope[1].

[1] [https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/product/aws-
govcloud/versu...](https://marketplace.fedramp.gov/#/product/aws-
govcloud/versus/azure-government?status=Compliant&sort=productName)

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deapu
:)

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setheron
I don't get the hate for hearing Oracle challenge another large huge company
in court.

That's the correct course of action in the US. If you disagree with something
you take it to the courts!

It's not David vs Goliath here where Oracle is abusing it's deep pockets with
lawyers.

Worse yet then people get upset at the outcome of the decision if it wasn't to
their liking.

~~~
Analemma_
I haven't seen anyone contesting Oracle's _right_ to challenge this in court,
we're just saying it was a waste of time motivated solely by sour grapes.
Absolutely everyone-- at Oracle, at the other cloud providers, and in the
Pentagon-- knows that Oracle's cloud is a joke compared to AWS/Azure and that
they didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of winning this case. We're
making fun of them for frivolous litigation.

~~~
RHSeeger
> frivolous litigation

Frivolous litigation that WE are paying for. It's our tax money paying for
those court cases.

