Another federal agency has decided that Amazon Web Services is the only commercial source capable of providing cloud computing.

In this case, it's the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, which issued Sept. 15 a notice stating that it will give Amazon Web Services a sole source contract to provide cloud computing for use in a pilot program to bring related coal mining datasets together in a cohesive environment.

The notice gives vendors until the close of business of Sept. 21 to contact the Colorado-based agency in case they believe that they too might have the ability to provide cloud computing services.

However, the notice warns that even should vendors respond with information, it's entirely up to the Office of Surface Mining whether or not to scrub the sole source contract in favor of a competition.

The technical requirements are for a cloud computing environment that provides computing infrastructure on-demand including virtual Windows 2008 R2 servers, ESRI ArcGIS Server version 10 with all available extensions (licensed with the Office of Surface Mining's existing ESRI license agreement), ESRI ArcGIS SDE databases with underlying DBMS and associated storage that can be scaled from 0 to 2TB on demand. Also, virtual machined instances should be available in multiple capacities from basic dual-core equivalent with 1-2 GB RAM to higher capacity instances with multiple cores and up to 16 GB of RAM.

The Denver-based contracting officer is Dawn Trudeau, who can be reached via email at dtreadeau [at] osmre [dot] gov.

For more:
- go to the Amazon Web Services notice on FedConnect (Solicitation Number S10PS00430)
- download a copy of the notice (.pdf)

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