When Amazon pulled out of Quebec, Ottawa said it would review its contracts with the firm. Documents obtained by The Logic reveal how much it depends on the tech giant.
It’s possible to extract the article text by disallowing both Javascipt and CSS on the site. Relevant portion:
AWS is one of eight suppliers with agreements to provide cloud services to the government. Ottawa has more than 600 contracts with the company, and since 2020, has awarded it more than $220 million in cloud contracts, the review found. That makes AWS the second-largest cloud vendor to the government, though it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the US$33 billion the firm reported Thursday in its third quarter earnings. AWS saw a 20-per-cent year-over-year sales growth this quarter, the largest since 2022, which the company credits to a boom in AI adoption and development.
Within Innovation Science and Economic Development Canada (ISED), the cloud infrastructure provided by AWS includes several proprietary solutions for the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, the Competition Bureau of Canada and Shared Travel Services, the portal that federal employees use to book and expense work travel.
Switching to a different provider for those services would take two or three years and require multiple teams of four to six full-time employees, the review found. “Alternative service providers with the infrastructure needed to handle ISED applications would almost certainly be other similar hyperscalers,” the analysis said.
Two or three years sound somewhat optimistic to me. It’s quite likely that it’s a really rough estimate. Fact is, AWS has a crap ton of little features that they add over the years, displacing smaller players or outright buying them, so that they can lock you into their service. I reckon that there’s also the need to re-engineer some of these services to rid themselves of those lock-ins.
It’s possible to extract the article text by disallowing both Javascipt and CSS on the site. Relevant portion:
Better get started, then.
No doubt there are some “low hanging fruit” that can be moved faster and easier than the larger and more complex deployments.
Two or three years sound somewhat optimistic to me. It’s quite likely that it’s a really rough estimate. Fact is, AWS has a crap ton of little features that they add over the years, displacing smaller players or outright buying them, so that they can lock you into their service. I reckon that there’s also the need to re-engineer some of these services to rid themselves of those lock-ins.