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The Pentagon is developing a follow-on to the $9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability(JWCC) contract vehicle it awarded in 2022 to cloud-service providers Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft and Oracle.

The Pentagon’s sequel to JWCC — dubbed JWCC Next — will similarly be a multi-award contract “but at a bigger scale” than its predecessor, according to John Hale, product management and development chief at the Defense Information Systems Agency.

Defense officials are finalizing the acquisition strategy for JWCC Next, engaging with industry and mission partners across DOD and are aiming to publish a draft request for proposal later this year before it goes out to bid.

“I would expect [JWCC Next] to hit the streets probably in 18 months,” Hale said on March 6 at the OpenText Government Summit.

To date, JWCC has awarded a total of $2.3 billion in task orders to the four cloud service providers, according to DISA, which manages the contract. Those task orders cover a wide range of mission-critical cloud requirements — some of which are classified — across the Defense Department and its many components.

Hale said that while JWCC enabled Defense customers to harness the power and functionality of the four leading hyperscale cloud providers, JWCC Next aims to bring them entire cloud ecosystems and third-party marketplaces—including from smaller vendors.

“What mission partners really want is the ecosystems built around the hyper-scaler provider. There’s a whole ecosystem of third-party providers that are built around hyper-scaler providers, and that’s what mission partners want,” Hale said. “They want the entire enchilada.”

Hale said about 180 cloud providers meet baseline cloud-security requirements for Defense Department consumption, and “we don’t have any way to easily gain access to those cloud providers.”

“What we’re seeing is a lot of our mission partners are wanting multi-cloud solutions,” Hale said. “And so what we’re trying to do is get a feel of the landscape and then hopefully come out with another way to allow access to those other providers that mission partners are asking for.”

One of those mission partners is the Army, which has been seeking the kind of commercial cloud services and ecosystems accessible in industry, the service’s chief technology officer said.

“So it's been trying to figure out how we just quickly make it for integrators to leverage those things with the same experience that they're trying to use to fit in the commercial realm,” Army CTO Gabe Chiulli said in a panel conversation with Hale March 6.

The Defense Department declined to comment on the size, scope or timeline of JWCC Next, but told "we are actively assessing the lessons learned that can be applied to JWCC Next.”

According to data from Deltek, the federal government spent a record $16.5 billion on cloud computing last year, driven largely by the Defense Department’s growing comfort with and appetite for offsite computing. Deltek projects federal cloud-computing spending to exceed $30 billion by fiscal 2028.

JWCC is just one of several multibillion-dollar cloud computing contracts across the Defense Department and intelligence community. In 2020, the CIA awarded its multibillion-dollar C2E cloud contract to Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Oracle and IBM, enabling them to compete for specific IC task orders. Amazon Web Services also won the NSA’s $10 billion cloud contract internally dubbed WildandStormy.

JWCC was itself a sequel of sorts to the canceled Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure contract, an attempted single-award contract the Pentagon scrapped after years of litigation and controversy.

A failure to properly protect access to its AWS environment is one of the root causes of the recent massive Volkswagen data leak, according to a presentation on the incident at the Chaos Computer Club on Dec. 27(More details: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gKvtJiU-mi4&list=PL_IxoDz1Nq2YICxl-KtTHOjEwxIOIsPrs&index=28).

But the security analyst who helped expose the leak said the $351 billion car manufacturer violated its own terms of service as well as regulatory requirements, especially GDPR, by not truncating or encrypting sensitive customer data from more than 15 million enrolled vehicles.

“They were collecting far too much data,” an IT security analyst who goes by the name of Flüpke told the audience. “If you want to evaluate battery safety, then you don’t need location data.”

The data VW collected, he noted, included a wide range of information, including user data such as name, email address, birthdate and physical address, car data such as VIN, model, year, and full user ID, in addition to EV data points such as odometer, battery temperature, battery status, charging status and warning light data.

The problem of vehicles retaining terabytes of sensitive information about their drivers is hardly new, but it has gotten much worse recently partly because electric vehicles (EVs) collect far more information. Reports of vehicle data retention problems started surfacing more than four years ago.

The issue is that car manufacturers are required to retain some of that data. For example, Flüpke pointed out that the European Union has required some vehicle data collection and sharing since 2018, as part of an EU effort to automatically send help to a vehicle involved in a serious accident.

Flüpke said that he found the VW data problem by combining various coding tools, including Subfinder, GoBuster and Spring. Using the tools, Flüpke said that he was able to retrieve the heap dump from the VW internal environment because it was not password protected. A heap dump lists various objects within a Java Virtual Machine (JVM), which can reveal details about memory usage. That is supposed to be used for monitoring performance metrics and for introspection examinations.

Within that heap dump were listed, in plain text, various active AWS credentials. When Flüpke confronted VW with the discovery of those credentials, he quoted the company as saying, “the access to the data happened in a very complex multilayered process.”

While that is true, Flüpke said, and the backend is not meant for end users, rather used for token exchange, “you could take an arbitrary userID to generate a JWT token, which is an auth token without a password. That is useful because you can give it a userID and suddenly you are that user. We can’t pilot cars remotely with this, but we can authenticate with an API from this identity provider and access user data.”

Data journalist Michael Kreil, who also analyzed the data, said during his presentation at the conference that the 9.5TB of event data included geodata coordinates, some of which had accuracy within 10 centimeters. It revealed where people went to work, where they shopped and when, what schools they drive their children to, and information about where law enforcement agents live.

Terms that are beginning to emerge, such as “supercloud,” “distributed cloud,” “metacloud”, and “abstract cloud.” Even the term “cloud native” is up for debate. The common pattern seems to be a collection of public clouds and sometimes edge-based systems that work together for some greater purpose.

The metacloud concept will be the single focus for the next 5 to 10 years as we begin to put public clouds to work. Having a collection of cloud services managed with abstraction and automation is much more valuable than attempting to leverage each public cloud provider on its terms rather than yours.

We want to leverage public cloud providers through abstract interfaces to access specific services, such as storage, compute, artificial intelligence, data, etc., and we want to support a layer of cloud-spanning technology that allows us to use those services more effectively. A metacloud removes the complexity that multicloud brings these days. Also, scaling operations to support multicloud would not be cost-effective without this cross-cloud layer of technology.

Thus, we’ll only have a single layer of security, governance, operations, and even application development and deployment. This is really what a multicloud should become. If we attempt to build more silos using proprietary tools that only work within a single cloud, we’ll need many of them. We’re just building more complexity that will end up making multicloud more of a liability than an asset.

I really don’t care what we call it and however, this does not change the fact that metacloud is perhaps the most important architectural evolution occurring right now, and we need to get this right out of the gate. If we do that, who cares what it is named.

Microsoft is getting ready to replace Windows 10 with the Microsoft Managed Desktop. This will be a “desktop-as-a-service” (DaaS) offering. Instead of owning Windows, you’ll “rent” it by the month.

DaaS for Windows isn’t new. Citrix and VMware have made a living from it for years. Microsoft has offered Remote Desktop Services, formerly Terminal Services, for ages.

Microsoft Managed Desktop is a new take. It avoids the latency problem of the older Windows DaaS offerings by keeping the bulk of the operating system on your PC.

But you’ll no longer be in charge of your Windows PC. Instead, it will be automatically provisioned and patched for you by Microsoft. Maybe you’ll be OK with that.

Unless you’ve been under a rock, you know IT departments have not been happy with Microsoft’s twice yearly major “upgrades” to Windows 10. Let’s call it what it is. These aren’t upgrades or updates; they’re service patches (SP).

Take the Windows 10 April 2018 Update — please! It came with more than its fair share of bugs. What was especially annoying was that “Update” fouled up so many of Microsoft’s own programs. When even Word, Outlook and File Explorer lock up, you know you’ve got a mess on your hands.

Many experts even recommended that, unless you were stuck with the April Update, you turn off automatic updating. They are right to do so. Windows patching was always chancy, but with Windows 10 you’re more likely to have trouble when you patch than you are to avoid problems. And isn’t that a heck of a note?

So, with this track record, do you want to pay good money to let Microsoft maintain your desktops for you? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Nonetheless, DaaS Windows is coming. Microsoft has been getting away from the old-style desktop model for years now. Just look at Office. Microsoft would much rather have you rent Office via Office 365 than buy Microsoft Office and use it for years.Microsoft Managed Desktop is the first move to replacing “your” desktop with a rented desktop. By 2021, I expect the Managed Desktop to be to traditional Windows what Office 365 is to Office today: the wave of the future. Or maybe tsunami, depending on your perspective.

I’m not happy with this development. I’m old enough to remember the PC revolution. We went from depending on mainframes and Unix boxes for computing power to having the real power on our desktops. It was liberating.

Now Microsoft, which helped lead that revolution, is trying to return us to that old, centralized control model.

Forget that noise. If Microsoft continues on this course, soon your only real choices if you really want a “desktop” operating system will be Linux and macOS. Oh, you’ll still have “Windows.” But Windows as your “personal” desktop? It will be history.

More details: https://www.zdnet.com/article/microsofts-got-a-new-plan-for-managing-windows-10-devices-for-a-monthly-fee

Cars have been pretty stupid in the past, even with all of the computerization and automation that has come in recent model cars. They still can’t diagnose and fix themselves. Most cannot drive without a person controlling them. And, worst of all, they offer pretty complex features that many drivers can’t understand, and thus can’t use.

Over the last several years, cars have been more and more software-defined; Tesla is the best-kown example. We now have automobile capabilities that can be downloaded and installed, such as to provide added range or self-driving capabilities. You just have to look at who is entering the auto game—technology companies such as Apple and Google. We’ll be driving tech, not just vehicles.

As cars become more software-defined, they are becoming more and more cloud-connected. Although they run software from the car’s core computer, they will increasingly communicate with a cloud-based mothership that typically provides the following capabilities:

Data patterns supporting accurate diagnostics based on thousands of other cars having the same problem, as well as recommended solutions.
Safety data, such as self-reporting of breakdown and accidents.
Automatic scheduling of proactive maintenance, including cars driving themselves to the repair shop in the wee hours of the night while you sleep.
Performance enhancements based on driving habits, location, altitude, and even local laws and regulations.

In short, we’ll be driving 3,000-pound cloud-connected internet of things (IoT) devices that can move at 100 miles per hour, adjust themselves, and operate without us. Cars will be software platforms, not just engines, transmissions, and steering.

You might think this shift will make something that is now simple into something complex. That’s true at one level, but it’s false at a different level. Those old simple cars of my youth required constant care. Today’s much more complex vehicles require just a minimum level, with 10,000-mile oil changes and 100,000-mile tune-ups. We’re moving to close to zero maintenance, and the maintenance you do need will be largely automated.

Cloud-based systems will control much of this, if not all of this. Are you ready for cloud cars?

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Oracle’s database chief, Andy Mendelsohn, pilloried AWS databases as underpowered for enterprise workloads. If your only ambition is to run “small, departmental databases with decent performance,” Mendelsohn crowed, AWS is adequate. But “If you want to run the biggest, baddest enterprise workloads, they can’t run on Amazon.” This is ridiculously false; AWS has had scores of enterprises on the record embracing AWS databases for their most mission-critical needs. But perhaps Oracle still desperately wants to believe it.

Originally the biggest threat to Oracle’s database dominance seemed to come from the NoSQL crowd, given how data has changed over the past ten years. For decades, the traditional relational database, with its assembly of data into neatly ordered rows and columns, served us well. As data volumes, variety, and velocity changed (the so-called three V’s of big data), the venerable RDBMS seemed outdated. Perhaps it is, but that doesn’t mean enterprises can afford a rush to the exits in favor of the flexible schema that NoSQL offers. And doing that is simply too painful. But for new applications NoSQL databases specifically and cloud databases in general are having a moment that keeps going and going and going. In 2011, the top five database vendors—Oracle, Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Teradata—owned 91 percent of DBMS revenue. By 2016, that number was down to 86.9 percent. Although that doesn’t seem like a precipitous drop, the database market is worth roughly $34 billion. A drop of a few percentage points is a very big deal, and it involves lots of cash. Oracle, for its part, has shed market share points every year since 2013. Yes, that share is still about 40 percent, which is roughly double that of second-place Microsoft. But the difference is that Microsoft’s share has grown every year during that same period. Oh, and AWS? AWS is “roaring up the charts,” while “IBM is dropping precipitously.”

No, we’re not going to see Oracle’s database revenue fall off a cliff. But that might not be because its customers remain committed to the database leader. Instead, they may simply continue to pay for stuff they don’t actually use. As much as 74 percent of Oracle customers are running unsupported, with half of Oracle’s customers not sure what they’re paying for. These customers are likely paying full-fat maintenance fees for no-fat support (meaning they get no updates, fixes, or security alerts for that money). These aren’t behaviors of companies that are committed to the Oracle value proposition. They’re just conditioned to write that check. Except, of course, for new applications.

For those new applications, non-cloudy NoSQL is taking a significant chunk of business, Adrian underlined. Nonrelational databases like MarkLogic and MongoDB now generate $268 million in revenue each year, a number that is “growing nicely” in the mid double-digits. If you add in Hadoop vendors, that nonrelational number jumps to $1.5 billion, or 4.5 percent of the DBMS market. Nonrelational databases, in other words, have “hit escape velocity.” This, however, is not enough to strike fear into Oracle. The largest, fastest-growing of the nonrelational vendors—Cloudera—could hit 40 percent growth each year for a few years and would still take years to get to $1 billion. That’s significant, but it’s not AWS—which, again, is “roaring up the charts.” Which is why Oracle fears AWS, and rightly so.

Despite being so late to the cloud party, Oracle now wants us to believe that it can learn from the mistakes of AWS, Microsoft Azure, and others to leapfrog them all. This is complete and utter nonsense. Not only is Oracle ill-suited to actually build a next-generation cloud database, because it has no experience running cloud applications at scale (unlike Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, which have that experience baked into their DNA), but Oracle’s volume and velocity of cloud investments lag AWS by dozens of datacenters and years, not months. Meanwhile, AWS’s database products are its fastest-growing services. Most of this database adoption is for new applications (which are growing dramatically faster than old-school, Oracle-inclined applications). But AWS CEO Andy Jassy has also announced more than 50,000 database migrations, much of them from Oracle.

Oracle is a fantastic database for yesteryear’s enterprise applications, but it is a poor fit for modern, big data applications. For these, Amazon will continue to gobble Oracle’s market share, $1 billion at a time. This will lead Oracle to fixate even more on AWS, but that fixation doesn’t seem to be fixing the problem.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) features solutions for computing, storage, database, analytics, networking, mobile, developer tools, management tools, IoT, security and enterprise apps. It aims to help businesses move faster with lower IT costs and at scale. Microsoft Azure features a range of solutions for deploying highly-available and scalable apps and APIs.

Both platforms have been consistently growing since 2008, however more recently AWS has taken the lead. It’s apparent that while the two platforms started at a similar level of traffic in 2012, AWS has grown faster. However, when you look at the two platforms by industry, Azure is the platform of choice for government, healthcare, insurance, energy and consulting industries, while AWS is the platform of choice for the rest of the technology industry.

The reason developers might turn to AWS over Azure or vice versa is because language and frameworks may be better suited to a specific cloud. The insights show C# developers choose Azure over AWS, while Node.js are more likely to choose AWS. “Developers who work with C and C++ were particularly unlikely to use either platform, which makes sense since those languages are rarely deployed on cloud applications. We can also see that developers who heavily visited the HTML tag tended not to visit cloud questions either; these likely represent front-end developers and designers who aren’t responsible for configuring cloud platforms.

Need more details: https://stackoverflow.blog/2017/07/21/trends-cloud-computing-uses-aws-uses-azure/