DOD napalms $950m AWS buy, burning it back by 90 percent

Enlarge / DOD wants to build a giant cloud called JEDI. But it scaled back a nearly billion-dollar AWS buy, likely because of protests from Oracle. (credit: US Army)

A major Department of Defense commercial cloud deal has contracted considerably after officials experienced buyer's remorse"or maybe after Oracle protests used a Jedi mind trick.

Last year, as part of a program spurred by the Defense Innovation Unit Experimental (DIUx), the US Transportation Command inked a deal with Amazon Web Services reseller REAN Cloud to start moving five of its logistics applications into the commercial cloud. Since USTRANSCOM relies a great deal on commercial logistics and transportation providers to get things places, this was a relatively easy sell to Department of Defense top brass.

The migration went so smoothly (by DOD standards) that the "Sprint to the Cloud" team at USTRANSCOM won the program an honorable mention in the DOD CIO's Cyber and Information Technology Excellence awards. And it came at a time when DOD leadership-and Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick M. Shanahan (a former Boeing executive) in particular-has been pushing for the DOD to offload more stuff to the commercial cloud.

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