This is not the contract you were looking for....

My first thought too, quickly followed by "The Last of the Jedi"

"I've got a bad feeling about this." Might be appropriate also.

Amazon and Oracle have spent the last 2 years fighting to get the contract award overturned.

MS will now spend the next 10 years fighting to get the contract cancellation revoked.

It does not matter what you do, the lawyers will always win.

They may not always win, but they always turn a profit.

Except those working for Trump, of course, I think he can only get any if he pays upfront now.

"MS will now spend the next 10 years fighting to get the contract cancellation revoked."

I suspect that the MS folks will probably be way too busy padding the bill they will send the government for work already performed and for contract termination costs to waste effort trying to get the contract reinstated.

Now get someone sensible to design a useful vendor-agnostic setup, and then get vendors to bid on that.

Vendor agnostic == lowest common denominator. If you go down that route you may as well build your own infrastructure as you'll get a horrific pile of legacy and lose all the value of cloud

Lowest common denominator is pretty amazing these days. Postgres, Docker, Kubernetes, nginx, HAProxy, rabbitmq, Kafka, Hadoop? These are the technologies dreams are made of, unless you're a cloud provider looking to lock in the government forever.

Yeah, go back and read the earlier articles on this smorgasbord of FAIL. The whole point was to deploy a solution with particular requirements reasonably quickly, and at a reasonable price. Microsoft won because they met those requirements. Amazon and Oracle lost because they literally fought to have the requirements changed instead of delivering what was needed, among other very good reasons.

This is nothing other than the egos of overfed swine trying to squeeze out a competitor from a feeding trough of government money. In a saner world Larry Ellison would be in jail and Oracle would be banned from government business for the systematic over billing and extortionate pricing of contracts the US taxpayer is stuck footing the bill for. Worst is that this was intended to address actual needs, and this fiasco has jammed up the works for what was to be a fast track project for a decade.

I don't see why you think one competitor is better than another here. It's likely the Trump-Bezos feud is what got AWS replaced with Azure.

But anyway. Your post reminds me that vendors don't just want technical lock-in. Emotional lock-in means you'll keep choosing them no matter what.

Sherlock Holmes icon in lieu of Doctor Phil.

Although its fashionable for governments to privatize and outsource there are core functions that cannot be left to a commercial provider. One important one is archiving, the preservation of information that's essentially the institutional memory of the country and its society. Since much of that storage is now in electronic form its important that governments control that storage and the infrastructure that serves it.

Our (US) government already has a significant investment in storage and computing through the NSA. This organization is dedicated to the security of the country but has wildly misunderstood the nature of threats to our society. It expends enormous resources capturing and categorizing every iota of communication -- that is, spying on everything and anything -- but what it should be doing is developing secure archiving for not just the government but for all of us. (It, along with the CIA, should also be taking a proactive role against malware instead of trying to develop it in the hope it could be weaponized against an adversary.)

We're learning the hard way that the price of convenience (which turns out to be not that cheap anyway) is a lack of resilience.

There's an idea: free cloud storage from the US Government. Call it "drive.gov".

Of course they'll probably hire a former Microsoft Azure exec to run it, so uptime will definitely be a problem.

It has several. Not everyone can or wants to use them for every project though.

I thought that the government was meant to be the consolidation and supplying of the people's requirements, for the benefit of the people. (And the people include those suppliers.)

Clouded their judgement was.

Who would deny that is an AWEsome opportunity for some folk ..... who both know what they are doing and how to do it with IT Command and Control and what needs to be done. Default on any of those requirements and failure is guaranteed ... swifter than a speeding bullet :-)

You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious.

At this point it is a lawyer size contest.

If you are a smaller player, better not submit as that will attract a swarm of lawyers willing to penetrate your bank accounts!

Biden, and the US, may be trying to cost cut after pulling from Afghanistan in the middle of the night, and selling off its hi tech fighter jets. I think they are looking for revenue sources, and the military spending is being downsized a little. JMO

I suspect that Biden is going to be rifling through the couch cushions for every thin dime that can be freed up, but the sales of the F-35 aren't a big part of that. We will sell the damn things to almost anyone at this point, in the hopes of staving of the probably inevitable death spiral of the old flying turkey.

Every sale to a current(and perhaps soon to be former) ally offsets some of the planes the US government is forced to buy on their own dime. Planes that still don't meet the basic airworthiness and performance requirements of their specifications and contract. They never will. It was never designed to deliver on it's promises, it's just a bottomless pit designed to siphon off budget from the DOD.

Sadly, when bad actor vendors will happily cripple projects like JEDI even when their bids lose on their merits, it makes it hard to hold down costs or get anything done. So we will blunder into our next conflict under prepared and with less resources than we should.

It could give them an opportunity to carve off a couple of small bits for the losers, rather like leaving an unloved child a shilling in the will. It stops them complaining they were overlooked.