Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft • Hacker News Board

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

#201

Post by kelp » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:11 AM UTC

TechBro8615 wrote: post #190

kartickv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fundamen…

Yeah, this is really where they get you.

For context, if you were to buy 10Gbps of dedicated internet transit, he.net is currently advertising that for $900/month.

If we convert that to GB per month it's 3,240,000GB, so we can calculate what AWS would charge based on list prices.

Using their pricing calculator: https://calculator.aws/#/createCalculator

Outbound from Cloud Front or US West (Oregon) to the Internet:

$165,891.11

That's a 184 x increase in price!

So yeah, you have to buy networking gear and other stuff, but you can get quite a bit of gear for $165K/month. Now you don't really want to run that 10Gbps link flat out like that, but you get the point.

The AWS markup on bandwidth costs is absolutely insane.

Pro tip: if you have a large enough cloud provider spend, you can negotiate the bandwidth prices down quite a lot, given their markup, they have some room to move.

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

#202

Post by grogenaut » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

ganstyles wrote: post #51

Jonnax wrote: post #16

Is Oracle cloud any good? Is it like the other providers where you can take a credit card and use? Or do you need to give your soul to oracle?

No, it is really trash. It's down there with IBM cloud. I've worked with it (and IBM) extensively, and with AWS/GCP (but not azure too much yet, interestingly). Depending on what you want AWS/GCP/Azure are largely fungible, Oracle and IBM are really lacking just about everything you could want, and I would be hesitant to call them "cloud" except by the barest definition of the word. Also worked with another one, who…

Charter?

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

#203

Post by kelp » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:12 AM UTC

donavanm wrote: post #191

kartickv wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

My swag would be around the $500K/mo opex and $5-10M/year capital expenditure mark it’s worth a conversation. I haven’t been deeply involved in infrastructure for a few years now. I did work in compute farms, networking, CDNs, etc for about 15 years previously. In my old comments you can find more detailed math on swagging out actual network & infra costs for “equivalent to cloud” infrastructure.

This sounds about right to me. The last time I was doing that kind of work it was at slightly large scale than that, and it always modeled out cheaper to stay with our on gear, in colocation space.

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

#204

Post by unethical_ban » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:19 AM UTC

scott00 wrote: post #114

Some useful context: Zoom also runs 17 of their own data centers in addition to using AWS and Azure[0]. This deal is to run their "expansion" on OCI. Hard to say what that means exactly, but it doesn't sound to me like Zoom is making a big bet on OCI. [0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/zoom-cfo-explains-how-the-co...

They operate in 17 datacenter locations*. Big difference.

The point stands that they have physical infrastructure and all their own stuff in cages around the world, not just cloud native AWS tools.

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

#205

Post by alfalfasprout » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:21 AM UTC

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.

This is hilarious considering Oracle is suing Google in SCOTUS over usage of public Java APIs...

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

#206

Post by djrogers » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:29 AM UTC

asdff wrote: post #28

bob33212 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, the technology behind zoom can be repicated in less than 2 years and for less than 100m.

Zoom feels like a pied piper-eskque app to me. Awkward and clunky to use, lag and issues are expected. Doesn't help that we've been given no guidance from higher ups on how to use the software, so we've been discovering features as we go. Today I finally learned how to let someone else share a screen, and that button was not where you would expect.

You don’t have to ‘let’ someone else share a screen with Zoom - any attendee in a regular meeting can do so. Unless your IT dept went out of their way to really screw up your default preferences, you might be thinking of another web meeting client.

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

#207

Post by latch » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:42 AM UTC

jayp wrote: post #186

oneplane wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If 'having your "own datacenter"' means colocation, how do you say "having your own datacenter"?

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

#208

Post by cobookman » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:44 AM UTC

skuhn wrote: post #180

dmw_ng wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was some leaked corp doc from Amazon (Wikileaks maybe?) that showed significant chunk of their DC space had a recognizable name attached to it, it looked a lot like they often just buy this stuff in too.

Yes, Amazon buys space just like everyone else. I have been in lots of buildings or campuses where they were located. They buy a lot of space, and they work with lots of providers, but they don't own very many sites. So I guess they don't "have a datacenter" for the purposes of this thread. No one I know in the business thinks this way in the year 2020. Designing and operating datacenter facilities is specialized wor…

Google & Facebook both build their own Datacenter facilities.

But they operate at a scale that is very unique.

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

#209

Post by blasteye » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:48 AM UTC

skuhn wrote: post #183

matt_heimer wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

That's with list price. I've helped with a migration larger than that, and was less than your 5mil number.

People forget that when you talk about customers spending 100+ mil/year they get heavy discounts on many of the SKUs.

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

#210

Post by skuhn » Wed, Apr 29, 2020, 4:49 AM UTC

1stranger wrote: post #193

skuhn wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bec…

At that scale you're talking about millions in storage cost a month so I'm not sure $5 million is that scary. Also for that amount of data it'd be faster to transfer as a stationwagon full of backup tapes ( https://aws.amazon.com/snowball ).

100PB would be $2.1 million per month. You're right that it is a similar order of magnitude of the egress fee.

That still means to exit AWS you have to add 2.5 months of opex to your budget, which will weigh against the perceived benefits of relocating the service out of AWS. That isn't an accident on Amazon's part -- there is a business case why ingress to S3 is free and egress from S3 is not free.

There are also a lot of problems around paying both the old and new provider during the move, so if you aren't very careful you could wind up going from a $2.1 million monthly opex to $9.2 million until the project wraps up. And what projects end on time?

Snowball may speed up your timeframe and reduce costs, but 100PB still costs $3 million to move and you still need to go back and sweep up the data from S3 once you've verified the data is complete.