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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

#231
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did. Tried their free credit stuff. Was seriously unimpressed. Felt like a beta test Unless it's way cheaper I don't see the point

Oracle and cheap. Thanks for the laugh.

That's not fair, this is about OCI not the larger Oracle. It's like bashing Azure for what Microsoft has done in the past (funny how we're not hearing much about that anymore).

OCI is cheaper than AWS on pretty much every metric. In this particular context:

"The Reuters article helpfully points out that Zoom has 217,000 terabytes a month of traffic flowing through it. If we assume all of that is from inside of Zoom’s environment out to the internet (it absolutely isn’t, but it’s a fine worst-case data transfer scenario) and all of it is moving to Oracle now that the deal is signed (certainly not happening, but work with me here), according to public pricing that data transfer would cost, per month: $11,186,406.55 on AWS, nobody knows on Azure because the pricing calculator thinks I’m screwing with it when I put that big of a number into it, and $1,843,630 (hat tip to Jeffery Lyon on that; I moved a decimal in an earlier version of this post) on Oracle Cloud."

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/why-zoom-chose-oracle-clo...

(disclaimer, I work at Oracle)

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

#232

I suspect Oracle is giving good deals as nobody ever considers them as a cloud provider, so they need to gain market share to stay relevant. They wouldn’t be in the top 10 lists of ones I would think of. How many here even knew they had a cloud you could use?

I think that's unfair (I may be biased as I work at Oracle) but many people would argue Oracle is well in the top 5 (if you look at global infrastructure and platform, and discount SaaS-only and/or regional vendors).

OCI is also growing very fast (aiming for 36 regions by the end of the year) and adding lots of products beyond basic compute and storage, particularly around cloud native (functions, managed Kubernetes, API gateway), of course database (classic, autonomous, MySQL, NoSQL) plus streaming, events, monitoring email delivery, marketplace etc. And a lot of Oracle products as PaaS (analytics, integration, blockchain etc.)

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

#233
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're right, AWS does heavily discount at this price point (as do other providers). Egress fees on the order of 40-50% off list are possible in my experience.

It’s even greater than the 40-50% off his 5mil number if using dx links.

Dx list with 100 PiB is 2 million. Add in discounts and you’re at much less than 1 mil total

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

#234
post #172

“We chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure because of its industry-leading security, outstanding performance and unmatched level of support.” Zoom stressed security first, Oracle's executive team has a close relationship with the current administration. I wonder if this is a lobbying play in light of China centric security concerns. Oracle isn't exactly known for its security, that would be Microsoft or Google.

Care to support that comment please? Mind you, talking about cloud platforms here not parent companies.

Not a salespitch, but Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) is built with pretty serious enterprise-grade security in mind. Couple of resources:

[1] https://www.oracle.com/a/ocom/docs/oracle-cloud-infrastructu... [2] https://www.oracle.com/assets/oracle-inf-cloud-security-wp-3... [3] https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/iaas/Content/Security/Co... [4] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/the-four-pilla... [5] https://blogs.oracle.com/cloud-infrastructure/core-to-edge-s...

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

#235
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?

Yes, you can very much take a credit card and use.

There's a free tier [1] which gives you an initial $300 credit for the first 30 days, then if you don't convert to a pay as you go model (absolutely your choice) will drop you to an "always free" tier that gives you a bunch of resources at no cost (2 small VMs, 2 autonomous DBs, 100GB of storage etc.)

For committed spending there is a universal credits model (which comes with a 30% discount by default).

Doesn't cost your soul either - have a look at the price list [2] or run through the cost estimator [3]. Also, some resources are always free (e.g. first 10TB of egress, cloud shell, kubernetes cluster, developer cloud services etc.)

(disclaimer, I work at Oracle)

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/ [2] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ucpricing.html [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/cost-estimator.html

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

#236
post #222
post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Good question. Probably the same. English, and especially business English, is not a precise language. I am not really an expert but was part of the larger org. Just to be clear - colocation here is in order of thousands of square feet. The datacenter provider provides redundant utilities. The customer does everything else.

Seems a little silly to blame english when people bend terminology to muddy the waters on purpose. When 'serverless' means easily using a server and 'we have our own datacenter' means 'we don't have our own data center and rent from someone else' maybe the problem is people trying to stretch the significance of what they are doing.

If someone says 'I own my house' and they actually mean 'I rent an apartment', no one is going to say 'oh well, english is an imprecise language'.

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

#237
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…

That's really unfounded, unless you're talking about an experience you had years ago when the platform was still in the early stages.

The current Gen 2 cloud (OCI) is very much capable. I would strongly suggest you either have a high level look at the products available (start here [1]), peruse the documentation [2], or have a go yourself with a free account [3].

Happy to continue this chat about actual products you thought were lacking, or your experience.

[1] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/ [2] https://docs.cloud.oracle.com/en-us/ [3] https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free

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

#238
post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In China the cloud provider pricing model is that you have a slider bar to select how many Mbps your instance can scale up (maxes at 100 to 200 Mbps). But that has more to do with controlling customers ability to burst whereas most other providers do the GB xferd. Some of the China provides have adopted the GB xferd recently, though.

So the way the slider works is that you pay for the max mbps irrespective of data transferred?

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

#239
post #186

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.

Western Europe and Scandinavia mostly.

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

#240
post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good question. Probably the same. English, and especially business English, is not a precise language. I am not really an expert but was part of the larger org. Just to be clear - colocation here is in order of thousands of square feet. The datacenter provider provides redundant utilities. The customer does everything else.

Seems a little silly to blame english when people bend terminology to muddy the waters on purpose. When 'serverless' means easily using a server and 'we have our own datacenter' means 'we don't have our own data center and rent from someone else' maybe the problem is people trying to stretch the significance of what they are doing. If someone says 'I own my house' and they actually mean 'I rent an apartment', no one…

The difference is the word own.

In all the examples given earlier, the words "I have a datacentre" (or the approximate "I have my own datacenter") vs "I own a datacentre" (or the approximate "I own my own datacentre") have very significant differences.

In the UK, many people would say "I have a flat in this district" and that would be understood as being a renter, since some UK neighborhoods are just too expensive, and renting is the norm rather than ownership.

Similar in North American cities "I have an apartment in a brownstone in Manhattan" - does not necessarily mean they own it, but it could mean ownership or rental or lease or rent-controlled/stabilized tenancy (which could go on for multiple decades/generations of inhabitancy).

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