JEDI Mind Tricks

The Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract was meant to modernize the Department of Defense's (DoD) technology with cloud computing. Instead, the plan has been fraught with legal maneuvers, political grandstanding, and delays. After the contract was put on hold twice, contested by Oracle, awarded to Microsoft under President Trump, and then challenged by Amazon, the contract is now canceled.

The Pentagon cited security concerns of relying on a single vendor and the current contract already being outdated because of the pace of cloud technology. The announcement suggested that it would end up working with both Amazon and Microsoft's clouds.

The Pentagon is right: multi-cloud is the future. But, of course, much of the software the enables multi-cloud is still being built out. Still, companies will trend gravitate toward organic cloud infrastructure that is undifferentiated from any cloud. Multi-cloud or the ability to be multi-cloud is the only way to reduce some of the high switching costs of cloud.  

Here is an NYTimes article that provides some more information about the contract and what's next.