Someone Is Waging a Secret War to Undermine the Pentagon’s Huge Cloud Contract
Well... To be fair, it's an AWS spec sheet reworded as an RFP. Other cloud providers - even Google and Microsoft - can't meet the requirements, because they don't have the same marketing jargon. For example, there's a requirement in the RFP for a "ruggedized" storage product. That's a made up word that Amazon uses to describe AWS Snowball, so no other company satisfies the requirement.<p>Some other AWS-only requirements:<p>* exactly 32gb of RAM. Google promises 30, Azure promises 28. We all know how realistic this isn't.
* 150 miles between data centers. This arbitrary number is exactly what Amazon advertises. Others can manage 100 miles, or 130, but this number comes right out of Amazon's advertising package.<p>Not to mention the idiotic idea of a single provider solution.<p>On the other hand, this is a 10 year contract worth about 1% of Amazon, Google, or Microsoft's bottom line in one year. So there's a bit of mountain/molehill going on here