Rui Carmo
So my colleagues in the US just won the JEDI contract, which is going to land inside Azure Government Cloud – a set of Azure regions exclusive to US institutions (including, inclusively but amusingly, “tribal governments”), and the NYT has what is probably the best writeup right now, including a blow-by-blow of the process.
It was pretty obvious that this would end up being either about Azure or AWS (what with Oracle’s ramshackle datacenter network and IBM’s decline into managed obsolescence), but it’s going to be interesting to watch the fallout in several fronts. There are a few insightful comments over on Hacker News, but as usual there is a lot of fiction (including actual mentions of Sci-Fi series) rather than fact in there, so YMMV.
But what I am really interested in is the humungous, gaping void that is the European cloud provider landscape (i.e., anything more sophisticated than barebones VMs).
That and whether or not the EU (which can be agonizingly irresponsible and borderline illiterate technology-wise, as borne witness by cookie popups everywhere) is even going to realize that it exists, and how far behind Europe is terms of cloud computing…
Update (Mov 1st): Well, someone finally woke up, it seems. I am not in the least surprised to see both the French and the Germans as the main backers of Gaia-X – but it is such a quintessential European thing for them to be the most vocal about it that I expect little to happen in the short term…