AWS wins 5-year, $700m+ contract for cloud services to US Navy

Amazon Web Services has secured a five-year contract with the US Navy for cloud services, just weeks after scoring its share of a major US Department of Defense deal for cloud computing.

The cloud division of online marketplace Amazon has been awarded a contract worth $723.9 million by the Department of the Navy as a single-award fixed-price enterprise software license blanket purchase agreement. The details were disclosed in a contract notice posted on the Department of Defense website.

According to the notice, the agreement is for AWS to provide the Department of the Navy with access to its commercial cloud environment, Professional Services, and AWS training and certification courses.

The Department of the Navy indicated that the purchase agreement will not obligate funds at the time of award, but instead these will be committed as task orders are issued using a variety of Navy funding types, including operation and maintenance and working capital funds.

The Naval Information Warfare Center Pacific in San Diego, California, is identified as the contracting entity for this deal, which will run for a maximum of five years from December 2022 through December 2028.

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Earlier this month, AWS was one of the providers taking a share of the $9 billion funding made available by the Department of Defense under the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC).

This was itself the successor to the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) contract, which was intended to hand provisioning of cloud computing services for the entire US military for 10 years to a single provider.

Microsoft was the winning bidder for that deal, but AWS, IBM, and Oracle all protested at not getting their share. The program was then cancelled and the JWCC brought forward instead.

As The Register noted at the time, all four of the big clouds are now to share the work of providing globally available cloud services between them.

It isn't clear whether this five-year Navy contract forms part of the already announced JWCC funding, but the $9 billion budget was supposed to represent the Department of Defense ceiling on cloud spend across all four nominated clouds. ®