Azure Is Better at Hybrid Computing Because AWS Is an Orchid
There’s an interesting explanation of the DoD’s JEDI award in “Opinion: Microsoft Fairly and Squarely Beat Amazon in $10 Billion Pentagon Cloud Contract.” The reason is:
In 2017, Microsoft designed Azure Stack to meet hybrid cloud computing needs, a distinction from AWS, which was designed for cloud-only computing needs without the flexibility of leveraging on-premise servers. That has led Amazon to chase Microsoft with hybrid-cloud offerings such as AWS Outposts, which launched in November of 2018 — well after the Pentagon bid had been opened. As of the first half of 2019, Microsoft was the only company among the top three cloud providers that has a generally available hybrid cloud. Microsoft’s Windows operating system has run on servers for decades, and it was a natural extension to offer Azure Cloud to run on-premise. Microsoft’s hybrid strategy has resulted in 95% of Fortune 500 companies using Azure today. That is a staggering statistic, which shows the superiority of hybrid cloud compared with traditional cloud computing. As J.B. Hunt, one of Azure’s Fortune 500 customers, said: “Microsoft didn’t ask us to bend to their vision of a cloud.”
Read full post with several illuminating additional links.
ROBERT STEELE: Amazon leveraged some but not all of my ideas from the 2007 briefing, but also went down an ethics rabbit hole I would not have encouraged — their delivery drones for example, are on call for police surveillance, and their front door cameras can be used to report suspicious neighbors, not just suspicious strangers, directly to the police. Get too violently vocal while playing a video war game and Alexa could “red flag” you anonymously, putting police at your door demanding your guns. Not cool at all. Amazon lost the JEDI contract bid for multiple reasons including arrogance. While I still favor Amazon over Microsoft for various reasons having to do with end-user convenience and global to local scale if Amazon ever implements the rest of my ideas and does so ethically, it is now clear they will not win their lawsuit. This is not something their lawyers want Jeff Bezos to know, I encourage all of you to share this post with @Amazon, @JeffBezos, @jeffbarr, @POTUS.
I would be delighted if Jeff Bezos cared to sit down with Steve Arnold, Bill Binney, and myself, there are at least three specific initiatives he could take that would assure his success in Washington, DC:
01 But the Redskins, rid us of Dan Snyder and Bruce Allen
02 Turn the Washington Post into a source of holistic analytics and true cost economics creating public decision support on all threats and policies
03 Offer to co-fund the Open Source Agency / World Brain.
Shorly I will be publishing a book of readings, Reinventing Intelligence: 30 Years in the Wilderness, at Amazon — there is much to love about Amazon, and much to fear. Here are two of the briefings that will be in that book.
2004 Department of State (March)
2007 Steele @Amazon — Robert Speaks, Amazon Files Patents…. Movie, Graphics, Script
