| HN Mirror

U.S. military hosts the single largest intranet in the world. It parallels the architecture of the Internet, but is entirely self-contained. Contracting with SaaS tends to revolve around RFP's in which you end up establishing an enclave within the Intranet, or (during the time when I was there and they were still flirting with the whole cloud thing), setting up a partitioned, high assurance, tunneled "over the Internet" into the Intranet DMZ. There were also many growing pains where different branches of the military realized SaaS wasn't really compatible with their operational domain. My "crowning moment" of finally becoming a true blooded Dev in the eyes of my coworkers was when a 6+ month project I got to the point of finalizing with a negotiated agreement between service provider and the agency in question got shit canned due to logistical incompatibility of the desired business model of the service provider, and the war fighting realities of the context in which it would be used. It was... A truly bittersweet feeling killing that metaphorical baby. It did teach me Rule #1 of Real Software Architecture though. Always check the legal copy/fine print before implementing something with the technical capability to work. Better to spend a month reconciling the service provider's expectations of how their operating relationship is going to look like first so you can suss out whether or not the development time to integrate this dependency is even worth it. It's an absolutely brutal lesson, that only tends to sink in successfully once you realize that your last 6 months of gestating a systemic augmentation was essentially a government subsidized miscarriage. It marks you. Or at least it did me. In the case of Anthropic, it sounds to me like someone went in, deemed the redlines non-issues since they were actually probably evaluating the throughput amplification potential on the logistical front, then someone had the bright idea of " but what if we used it here, without checking the contract or RFP scope first. In any other Admin., it would have been a mea culpa, and a training experience for someone in vendor relations and government procurement. In this admin, well... Not so much. It won't be the first time; as I can personally attest, and it won't be the last by a long shot. It's what makes Government work especially complicated.