Multiply SENTINEL out a few hundred thousand-fold and you’ve got the future of federal IT. It’s going to be frightful, insecure, unreliable, and developed by the lowest bidder for managers whose idea of designing a complex system is reading a Powerpoint deck and saying “that sounds good.”

This why, to a degree, I am not super-scared of some of the scenarios we hear about, where the FBI is building a gigantic unregulated database of faces for facial recognition. My immediate reaction is “so what?” It won’t work in realtime, or even quasi-realtime, it will produce jillions of false positives, and it will be canceled at massive cost in 10 years. Of course the data will still be sitting on some AWS or Azure data-bucket (probably world-readable) but – again – who cares? The data will be worth about as much as if you took every .JPEG off of facebook and stuck it in a database, which is basically, what the FBI did (except they added drivers’ license pictures and arrest photos, too) it’s unregulated by anything but computing’s laws of nature: who cares if it’s unregulated if it doesn’t work?

On the surface the story is simple, but it’s really not: there are applications that have been being developed for AWS and now the Trump administration wants the pentagon to use Azure? In other words: “port your code to Azure” – unless it was carefully developed in order to avoid any of AWS’ lock-in technology that is not available on Azure. Prediction: there is going to be a gigantic flood of waivers coming down the pike. The Pentagon should have allowed cloud development to use either one and spent its time developing governance frameworks (minimum operational standards) and negotiated large-customer pricing, instead. From where I sit, the very fact that The Pentagon thinks that all its cloud apps are going to work under either AWS or Azure shows how ignorant they are. It was never an “and” it was an “or” and their strategy needed to reflect that all along.