They were not the cloud you were looking for, insists Amazon Web Services in unsealed JEDI protest
- Reference: 1608124509
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/12/16/aws_jedi_protest/
- Source link:
The decade-long $10bn single-vendor contract [1]was awarded to Microsoft in 2019 . AWS had been the presumed front-runner for the US military's move to the cloud and, after losing out, has been [2]challenging the decision via the medium of lawyers .
The US Department of Defense conducted a re-evaluation over the summer and [3]opted to stick with Microsoft , further enraging team Bezos.
In a complaint
[4]PDF
filed on 23 October and unsealed yesterday, AWS alleged: "DoD's re-award to Microsoft compounds its prior errors to validate a flawed and politically corrupted decision." It went on to point out that where Microsoft might have had a price advantage before ("based on its noncompliant technical approach"), AWS's proposal now required fewer taxpayer dollars."Faced with the untenable combination of Microsoft's technical inferiority and now-higher price, DoD manipulated its evaluations to a degree that belies any facade of rationality," AWS continued.
AWS went on to highlight technical areas where it felt the DoD had "arbitrarily minimized" the company's "advantages", such as its [5]Nitro hypervisor while accusing the DoD of ignoring where Microsoft was less than stellar: "In particular, DoD ignored Microsoft's ██████████████████████████████. This failure should have earned Microsoft a deficiency that rendered Microsoft ineligible for award."
We can only speculate what that deficiency might be. We'd welcome your suggestions in the comments below.
However, the AWS protest saved its greatest ire for the current US administration and US President Donald Trump.
"These patent errors alone," thundered the protest, "warrant invalidating the re-award. But these errors did not occur in a vacuum. Instead, they can best be explained as the latest manifestation of President Trump's determination to steer the JEDI Contract away from AWS."
AWS added: "The President's interference in DoD's procurement decisions has been pervasive. It has destroyed the requisite impartial discharge of the procurement process by causing DoD procurement personnel to abandon their responsibility to apply the RFP's stated evaluation criteria reasonably, consistently, and fairly."
After noting "President Trump has made no secret of his deep personal dislike for Mr. Bezos, Amazon, and the Washington Post, or of his express desire to harm them," AWS stated Trump's alleged campaign against it "had its intended effect."
Even the ruling earlier this year was not free from influence, it claimed: "Faced with the Court's February 2020 ruling that AWS was likely to succeed on the merits, DoD undertook corrective action amidst an increasingly corrupt environment in which President Trump has made clear that anyone in the federal government who does not do his bidding will face the most severe career reprisals."
The written protest ended with AWS asking that the court continue to prevent the DoD and Microsoft kicking things off on JEDI, declare the "DoD's rejection of AWS's proposal and re-award to Microsoft is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law," and have the DoD to both reopen discussions and re-evaluate the proposals.
And, as well awarding AWS its proposal costs, the company also demanded the court "direct [the] DoD to replace the Source Selection Team responsible for the reevaluation of proposals or, in the alternative, responsible for reopening discussions with Microsoft and AWS, soliciting and reevaluating revised proposals, and making a new best value decision."
Microsoft's Frank Shaw, corporate veep of comms, said of the unsealed complaint: "Amazon seems to be saying the only way they can ever lose is if the procurement isn’t fair. But every month, the market tells them that’s not true. Large and sophisticated customers regularly choose Microsoft over AWS. They do this because of the strength of our technology, our understanding of complex projects, and our overall value.
"As the losing bidder, Amazon was informed of our pricing and they realized they’d originally bid too high. They then amended aspects of their bid to achieve a lower price. However, when looking at all the criteria together, the career procurement officials at the DoD decided that given the superior technical advantages and overall value, we continued to offer the best solution. We also know what it takes to serve the DoD having worked with them for more than forty years."
Shaw added: "The DOD’s independent IG report found there was no evidence of actual procurement interference so it is time we moved on and got this technology in the hands of those who urgently need it: the women and men who protect our nation.”
President Trump is due to depart the White House in the next month. The JEDI spat, however, seems set to run quite a bit longer. ®
Get our [6]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/26/microsoft_wins_jedi_deal/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2020/03/13/aws_jedi_microsoft/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2020/09/07/jedi_wars_aws_continues_to/
[4] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/12/16/redacted_aws_complaint.pdf
[5] https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/nitro/
[6] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Bezos' irony filter mislaid
By railing at Trump, Amazon is using his playbook by continuing not to accept the result of a contest that it lost.
Re: Bezos' irony filter mislaid
IIRC AWS won then Trump threw an epic tantrum and had the decision reversed - because The Washington Post printed articles that contradicted the dear leader.
"In particular, DoD ignored Microsoft's inability to organise a piss-up in a brewery."
Things that might have invalidated MS's bid
Well, the most obvious one would be the lack of 3 each data centres in two regions to ensure adequate resilience.
As Microsoft had 1.25 DC's in their western GovCloud region and 2.25 in the eastern GovCloud region when the contract was awarded, I'm pretty sure that's less than the required 3 per region. As far as I'm aware, Microsoft are still working to complete the final western GovCloud DC more than a year later (it was due to open H1 2021) and the second has only been up for a few months. Still, better than IBM and Oracle I guess who haven't even got around to purchasing land for their proposed
No big deal? The major savings for the contract come from consolidating around one vendor so the US1.25-$1.5bn annual projected cost in 2019-2021 for DoD cloud services that were supposed to be reduced to under $1bn/year under JEDI ($10bn was the expected 10 year lifetime cost if the all 3 renewals occur but is likely to rise as the DoD consolidates 100+ of the 225 "offical" data centres versus the estimated 2500 locations hosting multiple servers).
So awarding it to Microsoft will likely delay those savings at the likely cost of US$1bn. On top of the majority of the existing cloud migrated infrastructure sitting in AWS so that instead of tidying up the marginal DoD DC's (i.e. those where security barely scrapes above the required level and costs are stupidly high) you get to migrate all the stuff you moved in the last 3-5 years when Microsoft had no GovCloud Azure offering (they were busy getting their O365 infrastructure up to the required level given they were 5-8 years behind AWS/Google on GovCloud).
And this ignores any of the more technical "which cloud is better arguments".
This was a contract to save costs that likely doubles the cost of DoD DC's over the next 10 years which isn't easy to do - even sales people eventually have a nagging doubt that charging $1k for a cage nut with 10% annual maintenance is a little over the top...
Who benefits from the delay? Pretty much every vendor other than AWS and Microsoft as this goes through the courts. And there's an awful lot of big names in the US military industrial complex making 100's of millions in the process of "legacy" IT service contracts.
Re: Things that might have invalidated MS's bid
Why insist on 3 DCs for each region, and then go into vendor lock-in?
From a purely resilience perspective, it would have been more beneficial to demand inter-operability of the JEDI cloud services, and then award the contracts per region.
This would ensure
* that company X with a strong footing only on the west coast can take part in the bidding
* that the DoD can change their cloud service provider without the cost of "inventing the wheel all-over again"
* that the bidding process is less prone to corruption, since a "the winner takes the whole cake" bidding process might lead to a "use the whole arsenal including shady and illegal practices" bidding approach. If there is also the option of a partial win, the bidding may remain a bit more civilised
The Lost Jedi
What an unending whinge about life not being fair that case is. Has Amazon always been "fair" to its employees, suppliers, etc? Have a nice taste of being on the other end of the stick for once. As no fan of anybody involved in this affair, I hope they all continue this muck-slinging for as long as possible in order to look as undignified and crude as possible to as many people as possible.
Re: The Lost Jedi
At least half the cost of mud slinging will be at tax pay expense. The rest will be divided between AWS investors and employees. That split may well land mostly on the investors because it is difficult to take anything more from the employees but I am sure the best minds at AWS are working on it.
Microsoft - Total Inability To Sustain US Primacy?
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