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Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

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Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#181

Post by oneplane »

chrisseaton wrote: post #75
cmauniada wrote: post #13

Why? Is it because of cost? Perhaps nepotism? I don' see a reason why Amazon or Azure would be passed over in favour of Oracle. Why wasn't GCP a contender either? Something seems fishy... someone from Zoom care to chime in? Maybe they are afraid that Amazon or Microsoft with their tradition of copying competition would pose a threat? Even then, Microsoft is already competing using Microsoft Teams and if Amazon wanted…

> I don' see a reason why Amazon or Azure would be passed over in favour of Oracle. Why wasn't GCP a contender either? Because Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are competitors to Zoom. Why would you host on your competitor ?!

Because their hosting companies aren't your competitor. Just because they have the same general brand name slapped on the label doesn't mean they are one company. At the same time, even if it were a competitor: does it matter? Your service superiority isn't based on whose computers it runs on, as long as it runs well.

Say it's about the money: then yes, you could in theory have a problem with that, but one way or the other you'll have a problem: if you work at zoom and someone has an xbox, uses windows or uses office you're still tied to that 'competitor'. It seems to me that the competitor is just that specific element (Teams, Skype) and not everything that happens to be close to me. But I'm no MBA and my perspective is probably not the most profitable one.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#182

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

binarymax wrote: post #68
adrianmonk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can only speculate, but Zoom is really big in the news right now, so Oracle could have offered them a special deal so Oracle can be in the news too. If you aren't knowledgeable enough about cloud providers to evaluate them directly on their merits, then you look for signals. Some people might think, hey, Zoom is doing well, they are a well-known, up-and-coming company, and they chose Oracle, from which we infer th…

Pouring one out for the zoom devops crew now forced to work with Oracle cloud because of some high level partnership decision.

If they're smart they will maintain the ability to jump to IBM and play them off each other.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#183

Post by skuhn »

matt_heimer wrote: post #138
ram_rar wrote: post #109

I worked in a startup that was eventually acquired by cisco. We had the same dilemma back then. AWS and GCP were great, but also fairly expensive until you get locked in. Oracles bare metal cloud sweetened the deal soo much, that it was a no brainer to go with them. We were very heavy on using all open source tech stuff, but didnt rely on any cloud service like S3 etc. So the transition was no brainer. If your tech s…

Most cloud providers, Oracle included, have an S3 compatible object storage API - https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Object/Task... Even the few that don't, you can use something like Minio. I wouldn't consider S3 something that requires lock in.

Imagine migrating 100 PB from S3 to Oracle's object store. First of all, the egress fee will cost you $5,000,000 (no joke). Second, it will take months.

Don't think your early stage startup will ever have that problem?

That's exactly what a lot of other people thought 5-10 years ago, and now they're stuck in S3 which means they need to use EC2 to manipulate that data which means they may as well put it all in AWS because egress fees will eat their lunch.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#184

Post by jlgaddis »

enitihas wrote: post #139
jedberg wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that you're afraid of what legal might think of your response says volumes in and of itself.

Which company employees aren't afraid of what legal might think?

Pretty much any HN comment thread even tangentially related to "cloud" usually has comments from employees at AWS, Azure, and/or GCP -- you know, Oracle's three primary competitors. -- not to mention many other big tech companies (Facebook, Netflix, IBM/RedHat, and so on).

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#185

Post by notyourday »

goatherders wrote: post #161
ram_rar wrote: post #109

I worked in a startup that was eventually acquired by cisco. We had the same dilemma back then. AWS and GCP were great, but also fairly expensive until you get locked in. Oracles bare metal cloud sweetened the deal soo much, that it was a no brainer to go with them. We were very heavy on using all open source tech stuff, but didnt rely on any cloud service like S3 etc. So the transition was no brainer. If your tech s…

I ran an AWS practice for a large hosting company for two years. We had a number of situations where our prospect would say "annual spend with your managed services and our expected AWS bill would be $1M. Google is offering us a 2 million dollar credit to choose their cloud. What do you say to that?" "You should take them up on that offer." The incentives available from other cloud providers are MASSIVE if your busin…

Its a fairly standard CAF deal, but it requires a multi-year contact.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#186

Post by jayp »

oneplane wrote: post #176
barkingcat wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having servers in a colo is pretty much what "having a datacenter" means for the last 10 years or so. I'm surprised at your viewpoint of "having a datacentre" meaning only having direct ownership of the piece of land on which the datacentre resides. That's a pretty rigid and outdated definition.

Maybe where you live, but not where I live and probably also not where he lives. When we (locally) talk about having your own hardware we use terms like 'bare metal' and 'machines' or even the specific names of the types of machines, like 'the blades' or 'the dells'. We really only use 'datacenter' when we talk about a physical location we own, with power we own, cooling we own, networking we own, and access control…

Where is this place? I agree with grandparent - for the past decade or so, having your “own datacenter” means leasing floorspace in an actual datacenter run and managed by someone else.

I live and work in the Bay area. I was part of the larger org that ran Uber’s datacenter (co-located) and that’s how it was talked about.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#188

Post by kartickv »

kelp wrote: post #144
latch wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This just doesn't pass the smell test. Running your own data center is a huge capital and operational investment. While there are hundreds of companies world wide that do this, they tend to be core telecommunication companies (infrastructure), dedicated data center operations, dedicate hosting companies or companies with billions in revenue. A google search confirms that they colocate, apparently with Equinix. This i…

When they say "running a datacenter" they almost certainly mean "buying servers to put into rented colocation space". Just about anyone who has significant network connectivity has a footprint in an Equinix datacenter. In the Bay Area you want to be in Equinix SV1 or SV5, at 11, and 9 Great Oaks, San Jose. If you're there, you can order a cross connect to basically any telco you can imagine, and any other large compa…

At what scale does colocation make sense as opposed to a long-term commitment on AWS or other clouds, where you get a discount?

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#189

Post by notyourday »

For businesses that actually have users the biggest cost is not instances, it is the per byte billed network cost, including cross-AZ cost.

AWS cross zone traffic within the same region is not free:

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-cross-az-data-transfe...

and I distinctly remember getting bitten by the same kind of a bill at Google for traffic between their AZs within the same region, which makes me guess that Azure has the same business model.

If Oracle offered Zoom free traffic inside the region between different AZ's then it demolished AWS and GCP pricing.

Re: Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft

#190

Post by TechBro8615 »

kartickv wrote: post #188
kelp wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When they say "running a datacenter" they almost certainly mean "buying servers to put into rented colocation space". Just about anyone who has significant network connectivity has a footprint in an Equinix datacenter. In the Bay Area you want to be in Equinix SV1 or SV5, at 11, and 9 Great Oaks, San Jose. If you're there, you can order a cross connect to basically any telco you can imagine, and any other large compa…

At what scale does colocation make sense as opposed to a long-term commitment on AWS or other clouds, where you get a discount?

If you’re building an infrastructure company, or any bandwidth intensive product, it makes sense pretty early. For example, it would be impossible to build a competitive CDN or VPN company based on AWS infrastructure. It would also be hard for Zoom to offer a free tier if they were paying per gigabyte for bandwidth, since it would essentially mean every extra second of a meeting cost them money directly.

The fundamental problem is that AWS (or any major cloud) charges you for the amount of “stuff” you put through the pipe ($/gb), but with colocation you can pay a fixed cost for the size of the pipe ($/gbps). This allows you to do your own traffic shaping and absorb bandwidth costs without needing to pass them onto your customers.

This is the dirty, open secret of cloud pricing models. It’s also their moat, which makes it infeasible to do something like “build AWS on AWS.”

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