In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places

Re:In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places by killjoywashere on Sunday August 04, 2019 @07:42PM (#20609962)

You know, I've been in some data centers and top 50 HPC clusters ... I don't understand why the US government doesn't run it's own cloud systems, except for the appropriations. There are enough computer scientists in the larger org to field a major distributed systems engineering group.

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Re:In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places by acdha on Sunday August 04, 2019 @11:05PM (#20610851)

Here’s the civilian pay scale – think of how it compares with AWS or Google:

https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/salaries...

Now, think of the political climate: there’ve been decades trying to “trim waste” by steering money to the private sector, where efficiency is taken as a matter of faith. First you’d need to hire the technical leadership to properly plan something like that and then hire all of the people who’d build it, not to mention procuring all of the hardware & data centers, etc. You’re looking at years before you have a positive return on any of that – and all the while, every big contractor is going to have their lobbyists talking about how it’s a waste of money compared to going with them.

NASA tried this a decade ago with Nebula, which was part of the early OpenStack history. I don’t know exactly what happened with that but the people I know working on NASA projects are all using AWS.

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Re:In Pentagon Contract Fight, Amazon Has Foes in High Places by delfinom on Sunday August 04, 2019 @07:59PM (#20610037)

>I don't understand why the US government doesn't run it's own cloud systems, except for the appropriations.

Inability to pay high enough salaries for anyone to maintain it properly AND move it forward with new tech.

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