Endings and Beginnings (Part 1 – AWS)

Posted on August 13, 2019 by

Last week’s announcement of Amazon Aurora Multi-Master being generally available marked a kind of ending for me. It also served as a reminder that I haven’t written anything about my new venture, Gaia Platform. So nearly two years after I tried (and once again failed) at retirement, let me wrap up my Amazon Web Services (AWS) adventure and tell you about my new one.

The lure of working on databases for a new computing era, The Cloud, is what drew me out of semi-retirement and to AWS. I was running Amazon Relational Database Service (RDS), parts of Amazon Aurora (it’s complicated in that I had the control plane and product management reporting to me, and then the Aurora PostgreSQL project fully reported to me, but my peer Anurag Gupta owned Aurora MySQL and the Aurora storage system and is the father of Aurora; I get embarrassed when assigned credit that rightfully belongs to Anurag), the Database Migration Service (DMS), Performance Insights, and a few things that aren’t externally visible (e.g., the DBAs for AWS’ control plane databases, an operations team for a bunch of services in AWS under the CIA’s Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) program).

There were a lot of challenges in this new role for me and I relished them, even when I struggled. For example, I’d always forced my hand into the business side of the products I worked on but never had actual responsibility for the business. At AWS I owned the relational database business. While confidentiality considerations keep me from talking actual sizes, it was one of the largest AWS businesses and the fastest growing of those larger businesses.  In the weeks before I stepped down we passed one of the (even) more household name services in revenue. I have no real idea on the current business size, but doing some very conservative projections it must be an unbelievably big business today. What amazes me when I look back on the experience is not that they trusted me with engineering and operations for RDS, I had the track record to suggest I could succeed at that, but that they trusted me with such major business responsibility. That turned out to be an incredible career highlight for me, and I thank Andy Jassy, Charlie Bell, and Raju Gulabani for giving me that opportunity. Particularly Raju, because I know the only way it happened is because he committed to have my back.

After three years I announced I was going back into retirement. For those who don’t know, I live in Colorado and commuted every week (early Monday morning out, late Friday return) to Seattle. That I sustained it for three years is only a bit of a mystery to me, that my wife survived three years of it is amazing! But neither of us could sustain it longer, and didn’t want to move to Seattle. Plus we had some family things to take care of. There is more to this story, and we almost found a way where I would keep working for Amazon part-time.  But I realized I’d never contribute to Amazon in a way I found satisfying as a part-timer. So after a few months I pulled the plug on a staged retirement and did a cold-turkey retirement. Or so I thought. Once again a little credit here, I couldn’t have worked from Colorado without Raju having my back (i.e., in 2014/2015 Amazon literally did not allow people to do work when in Colorado, so Raju had to cover for me if there was an operational issue that needed VP involvement over a weekend), and he was the one who proposed a staged retirement.

So why was last week’s launch of Aurora Multi-Master a good end point of the AWS story for me? My one major regret from my days at Microsoft had been that we never shipped a “single system image”, multi-master, SQL Server clustering solution. When we did the original planning for building our own database business (out of the ashes of Sybase SQL Server) we’d put clustering in our 3 version plan.  Yukon (SQL Server 2005) was supposed to include a single system image clustering solution. By single system image I mean that an application can talk to and update a database on any node in the cluster  completely transparent to the fact that the database is distributed over multiple nodes. In other words, it looks just like you are talking to a single system. That’s what we’d done at DEC with Rdb (conceptually copied by Oracle to become RAC). Others had done variants as well, but after a burst of energy in this space in the 80s to mid 90s, vendors (except for Oracle) lost interest. The SQL Server team made a number of stabs at it, but they always faltered in the wake of either higher priority work or technical challenges. Doing single-system image is hard. So sharding, or dropping some of the transparency (Spanner is an example), or going to NoSQL models that had far fewer transparency demands, became alternate answers. I’ve been away from Microsoft for almost 9 years, and the SQL Server team for over 15, and SQL Server (or Azure SQL) still doesn’t have a single-system image clustering solution. But with AWS, that was once again the vision for Aurora.

I didn’t get to be the one that built Aurora Multi-Master, and I’m fine with that. When driving back from an Andy Jassy OP1 offsite in the summer of 2015 Anurag and I talked about single-system image clustering and how desperately we both wanted to see it done. No matter how we rejiggered the organization structure over time, we would make this happen. Anurag got to drive it, although he too left AWS before Aurora Multi-Master GA, it’s done now. Oh they have plenty more to do to complete the vision (e.g., multi-region multi-master), but the solution is out now. Take your credit card and go give it a try.  From my standpoint there is always a ton more to do  in meeting customer database needs in the cloud. But in terms of a feeling of completeness and ability to move on, having Amazon Aurora Multi-Master available lets me focus on what other interesting problems there are out there. I’ll talk about that in part 2.

Posted in Amazon, Aurora, AWS, Cloud, Computer and Internet, Database, Microsoft, RDS, SQL Server | 4 Comments

Ad-blocker Wars

Posted on May 31, 2019 by

About a year ago I wrote my Adblockers are the new AntiVirus piece. In the intervening period the war between ad blocking and web sites that depend on advertising has gone exponential. Many sites put up a warning asking you to unblock ads on their site, others block access entirely. And now Google, the tech company almost entirely based on serving ads, is using their control of the dominant web browser, Chrome, to limit ad blockers. Make no mistake, I am OK with the concept of advertising on the web. It is a great way to democratize access to content, whereas pay walls (however appropriate in many situations) limit information flow. But as I wrote in the earlier piece, as long as advertising remains a huge channel for distributing malicious content I will be blocking it. Because I refuse to white list them there are several web sites that I can no longer access, but it is a small price to pay for better security and privacy. On the positive side for some, there is one site I found valuable enough to pay for access rather than allow ads. But just one so far, and it was a very small charge.

While I use all three major browsers to some extent, Firefox remains my primary browser. That’s partially because it offers the most options for incorporating ad-blocking and other filtering options. It even has a built-in content blocker, though you must know to configure it to use for general browsing. One of my favorite Firefox features is that it allows you to specify a DNS server to use independent of what your system is set to use. So my family notebook computers have Firefox set to use Quad9‘s malware-filtering DNS no matter what network they attach to, without having to manually change network settings each time (when on our home network our router is set to use Quad9). I could use the same mechanism to point to an ad-blocking DNS.

Of course ad-blocking extensions for browsers are insufficient, and with Google limiting their capabilities on Chrome, are becoming the wrong point in the technology stack to block ads. There is also the problem of non-browser applications that bypass the extensions, as I talked about in last year’s entry. Fortunately there are other options. Ad-blocking DNS may be the easy and free alternative, with AdGuard DNS currently the leading option.  Some routers also offer built-in ad-blockers, though they may be part of a paid service. For example, the eero Plus service for eero routers supports ad blocking. That feature has been available for years, but is still labeled as being in beta, so caveat emptor.  For those who like to really hack, you can download new firmware such as Tomato or DD-WRT to your router, or build your own Pi-hole. I keep getting tempted to add a Pi-hole to my network, but it is down a long list of things I may never get time to do. More consumer-friendly hardware solutions such as the little known eBlocker are available. I suspect as this category grows the mainstream vendors will increasingly include ad blocking options on new routers, which is great because my experience with whole-home devices that sit beside the router is decidedly poor.

There are also paid system-wide solutions. I’ve mentioned AdGuard for Windows before, but still haven’t given it a serious try. There is also a version for the Mac. I did pay for AdGuard for iOS Pro, which can perform adblocking across an iOS device rather than just in Safari. Don’t confuse this with the free AdGuard for iOS, which is a Safari extension. Not that it too isn’t a good adblocker.

And then there is Microsoft (and Apple, but I don’t follow MacOS developments). It is unclear how Microsoft’s adoption of Chromium as the basis for Edge will be impacted by Google’s latest change to Chrome. Will Microsoft follow Google’s lead,or continue to support a fully featured interface for ad blocking extensions? Microsoft abdicated its leadership role in this space when they failed to move the Tracking Protection List feature forward from Internet Explorer into Edge. They could either return to leadership by adding new features to the Chromium-based Edge, emulating Firefox, add new features to Windows that work across all browsers and applications, continue to leave this to others, or adopt Google’s privacy and security unfriendly behavior. While disappointing, I suspect they will take the middle road and leave this to others.

What you should notice is the one option that would save ad-supported websites, a move by the advertising industry to truly protect security and privacy, is absent. Maybe there is some work going on there, but so far it hasn’t made it to the mainstream. As I said a year ago, they are running out of time to save themselves. The escalating ad blocking war tells us that it is just about too late.

 

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Privacy, Security, Windows | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Prime 1-Day Delivery Really is Different

Posted on May 3, 2019 by

At last week’s earnings call Amazon announced it was moving Amazon Prime from its historical 2-day shipping to 1-day shipping. Inevitably there were articles saying how Walmart or Target or whoever already had this. Or even better than Amazon, had same day delivery for some common products. All because they delivered from their large network of stores. I’m going to call BS on that, because “delivering from their stores” turns out to be more a symptom of a problem then a means of solving it.

Go back to Amazon’s origins as an on-line bookseller and Jeff Bezos’ recognizing that he could offer access to a vastly larger number of books (basically all those in print) than you would ever find in your local bookstore. Far more even than in the giant bookstores being built by chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders. This observation holds true more than ever in today’s retail environment. A retail outlet, even one as large as a Walmart Supercenter, only stocks a tiny fraction of the products, brands, styles, colors, sizes, etc. that are available. And in one of the most frustrating parts of the shopping experience, they frequently don’t have what you are looking for when you go into the store.

It is a very rare event when I go out shopping in local retailers that I come home with every item I was looking for. Even going to a store I know carries an item I want is often an unsatisfying experience. “Sorry you just drove 30 minutes and dealt with parking issues, crowds, etc. we are out of stock on that.” ^&%$(. “Oh, you like those shoes? Sorry, we don’t carry that size in store but you can order it on our website.” “We only carry the 2′ version of that cable in the store, if you want the 4′ you’ll have to order it on our website.” Brand of a particular nutritional supplement? Lets roll the dice and see if this store carries it and as it in stock at this very moment. My preferred brand/scent of antiperspirant? The Safeway stores in Denver seem to stock it, but not the ones around Seattle. And so on. As a result, I don’t bother going to stores. When I need something I just order it. Most of the time from Amazon.

While being able to deliver in one day, or same day, from a local retail outlet can be a very useful part of a fulfillment system, any attempt to make it the center of the experience replicates its bad characteristics to the online world. I don’t really care if Walmart or Target can deliver to my house in 20 minutes if neither carries the antiperspirant I want. Or if they are out of stock on the style, color, and size jeans I am looking for.

I’ve been living in an area where Amazon already offers free 1-day Prime delivery on many items for orders over $35. On Tuesday I realized I’d lost my Apple Pencil I had a new one on Wednesday, despite my SUV being in the shop. Amazon also offers various same-day delivery programs in my area, though I haven’t made use of those services. The news in Amazon announcing that they were moving Prime to 1-day delivery as the default is that they are building out their logistics system to support doing so for a very large portion of the items available on Amazon.com. And that is a whole different beast, both in complexity and in customer offering, than adding a delivery service from your local poorly stocked store. It’s the very same advantage that Jeff Bezos’ had over bricks and mortar bookstores on Day One. And not a surprise for a company where “it is always Day One”.

 

 

 

Posted in Amazon, Computer and Internet, Retail | 3 Comments

DMARC or Die

Posted on March 2, 2019 by

Let me ask a simple question, when are we going to get serious about dealing with unauthenticated email and its associated Phishing and Malware risks? If you think the industry is already taking this seriously, and that it is simply a hard problem, you are (IMHO) just wrong. Take this little snippet from the Microsoft Office 365 documentation on their handling of inbound mail that fails a Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance (DMARC) check:

If the DMARC policy of the sending server is p=reject, EOP marks the message as spam instead of rejecting it. In other words, for inbound email, Office 365 treats p=reject and p=quarantine the same way.

In other words, in Microsoft’s infinite wisdom they ignore instructions from the domain owner to shred, incinerate, and bury deep in the earth mail that fails the checks they established to prove it comes from them, and instead put that mail in the Junk folder where 100s of millions of naive users will find it and believe it might be legitimate. This may have been a wise step back when DMARC was fresh and new in 2012, today it is simply irresponsible of Microsoft to favor legacy behaviors over a domain owner’s explicit instructions.

I don’t really want to pick on Microsoft, other than as a representative of the industry overall. We have the tools (SPF/DKIM/DMARC) to dramatically impact the SPAM problem but aren’t driving adoption, and proper usage, at a rate commensurate with the danger that unauthenticated email represents. SPF and DKIM have been with us for about 15 years. After 15 years we should no longer accept excuses such as SPF breaking legacy (pre-)Internet systems like listservers, there has been plenty of time for alternate compliant systems to be deployed. Unfortuntately nearly every SPF record seems to end with a soft-fail indicator, meaning “I don’t know who might legitimately send email on my behalf so don’t actually reject anything”. DMARC, which really brings SPF and DKIM into a useful framework, has only been adopted by 50% of F500 companies. And nearly all of them have DMARC policies of NONE, meaning just go ahead and deliver mail that fails authentication to the user’s inbox. WTF? And if they do take DMARC seriously only to have Microsoft ignore instructions to REJECT mail that fails authentication, it’s enough to make a CISO drink.

Is it going to take legislation to make the industry get serious? Maybe if Microsoft were subject to a lawsuit with treble damages because they delivered a malicious email to people’s junk folder rather than honor the DMARC REJECT policy we’d see some action. Not just by Microsoft, but by every organization fearful that new legislation had made it clear that failure to adopt well established anti-SPAM techniques subjected them to unlimited financial exposure.

We need a hard timetable for DMARC adoption, and if industry doesn’t do it then perhaps it will take a legislative push. In either case, we need a date by which all domains either establish a DMARC policy or have their mail rejected by recipient servers. We need a date by which a DMARC policy must be either REJECT or QUARANTINE. We need a date by which servers must enforce the DMARC policy rather than just check it. The later is actually the first thing to be tackled. If someone has taken the trouble to establish a policy, a server should enforce it! Hear that Microsoft? And we need a date by which REJECT is the only acceptable policy. Want to install some other milestones, fine. But let’s stop with the excuses. It really doesn’t matter if this is a problem of the perfect being the enemy of the good, or of competing interests, or just inertia. Throw out the excuses and DMARC or Die.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Phishing, Privacy, Security | Tagged , , , | 5 Comments

The Travel Buddy PC

Posted on November 19, 2018 by

There have been a flurry of articles and blog posts lately on the topic of can the iPad Pro replace a PC (Windows or MacOS), and I thought it was time to wade in to the muck. If you’ve read my blog these last (almost) 9 years then you’ll guess some background on where I land on this topic. But before we get there, let’s talk a little about observations.

The other day one of our friends came to visit for a few days. While she has been an iPad (both the 9.7″ and iPad Mini) user ever since Apple released them, in the past whenever she needed to do work she pulled out a MacBook. Not on this trip however, instead she sat on our couch with a 12.9” iPad Pro. When I queried her about it she said that when she traveled she preferred to take the iPad Pro with her rather than the MacBook. It hadn’t replaced the MacBook, but it addressed an overlapping requirement.

Another friend, a former Microsoft C-level executive, uses the iPad Pro in much the same way. He has a few Windows notebooks as well as a Mac, yet the device he always has with him is an iPad Pro. I have seen him use it to present to another former Microsoft C-level executive on a large monitor, and present to senior (including C-level) executives at both a large bank and a medium-large technology company. He can also frequently be seen using the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro to take notes in OneNote.

Our friends’ use cases caused me to reflect further on my wife and my own iPad Pro usage. While we both have notebooks, and a family desktop, for serious productivity work, our go to devices for portable personal computing are our iPad Pros. Indeed, this blog is being written on my new iPad Pro 11″. It is sitting on the ottoman, its base and keyboard stable (actually more stable than my top heave Surface Book 2 would be) while I sit on the edge of the couch. The viewing angle is almost right, I do wish I could adjust it a little more, but certainly not a problem. While the Surface Pro is more adjustable, most traditional notebooks really don’t offer a better angle for how I’m sitting, their screens don’t go back far enough. I haven’t tried the 11″ on an airplane yet, but my 9.7″ worked great on an airline tray and it worked adequately on my lap. The 11″ keyboard/case design is more stable than that used on earlier iPad Pros and passes the lapability test far better than many of the 2-in-1 Windows PCs I’ve tried.

I regularly use an iPad Pro to do management of my AWS account resources, research problem solutions, and of course write emails. I also use it for spreadsheets and preparing presentations. Some of those (famous) narratives that are the bread and butter behind all decisions at Amazon were partially written on my iPad Pro 9.7″. I’ve even done some limited software development on it, by using it to connect to both a remote Windows desktop and an Ubuntu Linux development machine. While I wouldn’t recommend the iPad Pro be a primary computer for any of these things, it does most of them adequately enough to let you leave your Windows or MacOS notebook behind much of the time.

My iPad Pro is almost always with me. I slide it under the seat of the car when I am out and about, take it into restaurants when I dine alone, take it to the doctor’s office or car dealer etc. when I know I’m going to be waiting around. Take it to business meetings so I can take notes or do research. And usually it is the only computer I take with me when doing non-business travel.

I only take the Surface Book 2 when I am in full work mode. Then it travels between my home, a client, whatever I am currently using as an office, etc. I take it if I’m in the middle of building something serious, where the advantages of having a full WIMP user interface at my disposal makes me more productive. But that’s my 10% use case. Most of the time my SB2 sits docked to a large monitor in my home office.

When people ask the question “Can an iPad Pro replace my notebook” the answer is a clear “much of the time”. For me the iPad Pro is ideal as what I call the Travel Buddy computer (or even Travel Buddy PC). It retains the application library and content consumption strengths of the original iPad, while getting to the 80-90% mark on content creation compared to similar Windows tablets/2-in-1s. Recent Windows systems like Microsoft’s Surface Go also fall into the Travel Buddy category, but are too weak in tablet usability and limited application library to address most user’s non-work desires of a Travel Buddy PC.

So what are the biggest limitations of the iPad Pro as a notebook replacement? As others have noted the lack of a mouse or equivalent pointing device makes some work painful. In particular, cut/paste. The iPad Pro has an advantage over a PC in terms of broad adoption within applications of sharing entire objects, and sometimes that makes them feel superior. But if you need to take a precise region of data, like part of a list within a document, and copy it to another document, then the PC wins. PCs are also much better at multiple windows than the iPad Pro, although this is somewhat a matter of taste. As I’ve written in the past, I mostly run in full-screen mode no matter how big the screen I’m using. Sometimes I use two windows so I can look up data at the same time I’m filling in a form or writing a document. Well, the iPad Pro can do that. But if your work style is to keep 3, 4, 5+ windows open on the screen at the same time then…what on earth are you doing buying an 11″ or 12.9″ display device of any variety?

So could you replace your notebook with an iPad Pro? For many scenarios absolutely. For all scenarios no way. And in particular, could an iPad Pro become your only (non-phone) computing device? I think for a surprising number of the 1.5B PC users out there it could, but that is because many of them don’t really rely on the PC’s strengths. And for all of us, the computer you have with you always beats the computer you left at home. Which makes the iPad Pro a good alternative to a Windows notebook or MacBook as a Travel Buddy.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Mobile | Tagged , | 4 Comments

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory

Posted on October 31, 2018 by

Once again Microsoft appears to have snatched defeat from the jaws of victory, this time repeating a key mistake from the Windows 8 era.  Microsoft was on the path to a coupe, launching the seemingly excellent Surface Go well ahead of Apple’s launch of the next generation of iPad Pros.  It also launched the Surface Pro 6 ahead of Apple’s launch, though with a much smaller lead.  So where did Microsoft go wrong?  NO LTE.  Oh they promise LTE in the future, but futures don’t cut it in this case.  This is exactly where Microsoft (and its ecosystem) screwed up back in 2013, and has continued to screw up in successive launch cycles.

Back in 2013 the excellent Dell Venue 8 Pro, and other Windows tablets, launched with a promise of LTE, and then it never appeared.  Within the Surface line Microsoft has always either ignored LTE, delayed it for well beyond initial launch, and if it did arrive they made it hard to buy (i.e., targeted the business sales channel) rather than featuring it.  Now we have Microsoft singing the praises of “Always-Connected PCs”, but they don’t walk the talk.  For Microsoft, being “always connected” only applies to low-end ARM-based Windows 10 systems.  And they so far haven’t even offered one of those themselves.

With Apple you just select WiFi-Only or WiFi+LTE as part of its normal sales processes, both online and in-store.  And they launch (and generally ship) the LTE models concurrently with the WiFi-Only models.

I was completely ready to spring for a Surface Go the moment I could get one with LTE, and then yesterday Apple launched the new generation of iPad Pros.  There are a few things that the iPad Pro is not good at, like software development, but for my daily on-the-go needs it is near perfect.  And most importantly, I will have one in my hands, WITH LTE, in a couple of weeks.  So the moment has passed Microsoft, and while you keep talking about being always connected Apple is doing a much better job of walking the talk.  The Surface Go likely isn’t going anywhere, and I’m not particularly hopeful about the “Always-Connected PC” initiative either.

Posted in Computer and Internet, Microsoft, Windows | Tagged , , | 6 Comments

Google goes to the dark side on JEDI

Posted on October 9, 2018 by

Every time I read an article on the U.S. Department of Defense large Cloud project known as JEDI I find myself suppressing an urge to comment.  Google dropping out of the bidding finally made that urge difficult to suppress.

It is almost certainly true that only Amazon (AWS) and Microsoft have the current breadth of offering to meet much of the JEDI requirements.  It is equally true that neither of them have all the pieces needed for this contract, they are going to have to build new capabilities as well.  Most articles I’ve read focus on certifications as a differentiator, and while those may represent a minimum bar for selling into this market and a demonstration of a Cloud’s maturity, they seem neither a significant differentiator nor a significant hinderance to a vendor’s ability to compete for the RFP.  Put another way, if the rest of the RFP response showed overwhelming leadership then a roadmap for achieving the needed certifications would be sufficient to overcome the AWS and Microsoft existing certification leads.

The problem for every potential bidder is that they either need to partner to meet the full RFP requirements and/or commit to significant developments that could negatively impact (e.g., in opportunity cost) their commercial offering roadmaps.  The whining about JEDI being a single source contract says more to me about  tech industry disdain for partnering amongst major players than it does about the nature of the contract.  DOD is used to many, if not most, major contracts involving partnerships amongst the top suppliers (aka, competitors).  Boeing/Lockheed, Lockheed/Boeing, Lockheed/Northrop Grumman, Boeing/Saab, etc.  The right bid from a lead/prime with a lot of DOD experience would have a strong chance to challenge AWS and Microsoft.  For example, IBM has lots of the pieces for a bid and decades of experience being a Prime contractor for DOD.  It is the latter, not their fragmented commercial cloud offerings, that make them a serious contender to win JEDI.

The real question about JEDI, and likely the real meaning behind Google’s using lack of certifications as an excuse to drop out, is how much a vendor is willing to let the JEDI requirements impact their commercial roadmap.  AWS’ Andy Jassy likes to say that there is no compression algorithm for experience.  While that sometimes sounds like a marketing sound-bite, there is a lot of truth to it.  When the cloud was new, and enterprise adoption was near non-existent, AWS aggressively went after a number of deals for the experience they would provide.  Those deals were key to getting AWS to its current leadership position, because they prepared an organization with only eCommerce DNA to address industries it otherwise couldn’t understand or relate to. One of those was the U.S. Intelligence Communities’ Commercial Cloud Services (C2S) contract, which many point to as one of AWS’ key strengths in the JEDI bid.  Certainly AWS wouldn’t be in a good position to win the JEDI deal without C2S, because it would face the “no compression algorithm for experience” dilemma.  And while others may not have the direct classified cloud experience C2S gave AWS, Microsoft, IBM, and Oracle have decades of experience working with DOD and meeting their most demanding IT needs.

C2S is most important in the context of how much a young and small AWS was willing to impact its commercial roadmap to gain experience at working in the toughest public sector environments.  Both the learnings, and yes the optics, of being able to support the most demanding security environment have had a huge impact on AWS’ ability to attract large enterprises to its cloud.  This is where Amazon’s focus on the long-term comes into play.  C2S was a drop in the bucket on public sector IT spending.  JEDI is still just a toe in the water.  AWS will value JEDI not only for the business it brings, but for the things it forces them to do to meet DOD’s requirements.  Many of which it will bring back into its commercial offerings. Oracle will value it for giving their cloud a legitimacy they have yet to achieve. It could actually save their IaaS/PaaS offerings from oblivion.  IBM seem more likely to value the revenue than other benefits. Microsoft likely sees it as validation that the direction(s) they’ve taken with Azure (including Azure Stack) has them equal to or ahead of AWS (without having to fall back on winning because the customer is an Amazon-retail competitor, or buying the business with a “strategic investment”).  Sorry, I couldn’t resist taking a little dig at my Microsoft friends.

And Google?  Google’s primary marketing thrust  is you should use Google Cloud because everyone wants to do things just like Google does.  But if Google doesn’t want government to use AI like they do, and may in the future not want government to use some of their other technologies, and doesn’t want to disrupt their commercial roadmap to meet DOD requirements, then Google can’t bid on the deal.  The same applications that Google doesn’t want its AI technology to be used in could make use of technologies like BigQuery and Spanner, so how can Google offer those as part of JEDI?  And how much does Google want to focus its infrastructure work on being able to quickly standup a new region at a newly established military base vs continued development of its commercial regions?  How hungry are they for this business?  Apparently not very as they’ve decide to go dark on the bidding.

The company that wins this business is going to be a company that is hungry for it, and not just for the revenue it brings.  That is always important of course, and being able to make a profit at it is just as important.  But in the end the winner is going to be, or at least should be, someone with a passion for the DOD customer base and for applying the learnings from JEDI to moving the Cloud up another notch in addressing broader customer needs.  I obviously see that from AWS and Microsoft, and Google already made it clear that isn’t the case for them.

Posted in AWS, Azure, Cloud, Computer and Internet | Tagged ,