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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

#191

Post by donavanm »

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?

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.

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

#192

Post by mmmBacon »

KorematsuFred wrote: post #158
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…

So many people forget that running data center is a super complex business not just in point of technology but also in terms of operation. I have known people who tried to setup a data center in India and it took them around 2 years to have the first rack installed. Biggest hurdle was to get a license to store fuel in large tanks for their generators. Not to mention many of those permissions have to be renewed annual…

It’s difficult but it’s not that hard and it’s well worth the investment. When I was flirting with founding a company I looked at this trade off and with hiring/overhead etc... it was significantly cheaper to roll our own than it was to use AWS. It was only cheaper at the earliest stage.

The only actual reason to use AWS is to not divert any energy to doing anything else but scaling the company. The only problem was that by the time you are at some reasonable scale, AWS has you pretty locked in.

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

#193

Post by 1stranger »

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…

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).

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

#194

Post by rantwasp »

latch wrote: post #131
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...

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…

yeah no. Amazon does have data centers. A lot. Maybe you’re talking about points of presence for something like CloudFront where indeed it’s not feasible to build a datacenter in each location - but for major regions AWS has its own datacenters.

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

#195

Post by kitteh »

latch wrote: post #131
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...

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…

Amazon has to be in colos for their network infrastructure to interconnect with their peers (private peering and internet exchanges) and transit providers. Direct Connect also in there for similar reasons (to be closer to customers). This is all public information and peeringdb.com shows what locations they're in.

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

#196

Post by redis_mlc »

jakupovic wrote: post #134
redis_mlc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS Netflix had a 5-day outage caused by issues with their private DC back in the day. IT mgmt. decided their expertise wasn't in operating DC's, SV real estate was too expensive, and doing multi-region themselves was too expensive. AWS was picked as it was the only viable cloud offering at the time, and the decision…

aws was used for storage and encoding initially. source: worked at aws

Encoding servers, but not streaming servers.

The well-known US CDNs were used for streaming.

Also, the cloud they picked doesn't matter because:

1) They used their own ASG UI, Asgard, since AWS initially didn't have one.

2) With around 1,000 engineers, they could migrate clouds at any time at a future date (or build their own CDN. There was no silo politics as in most other companies.)

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

#197

Post by kitteh »

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…

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.

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

#198

Post by grogenaut »

pmart123 wrote: post #113
redis_mlc wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS Netflix had a 5-day outage caused by issues with their private DC back in the day. IT mgmt. decided their expertise wasn't in operating DC's, SV real estate was too expensive, and doing multi-region themselves was too expensive. AWS was picked as it was the only viable cloud offering at the time, and the decision…

From my recollection, Netflix started using AWS before Amazon launched Prime Video as well?

Amazon launched and killed a video project several years before prime video

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

#199

Post by matt_heimer »

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 ).

For 100PB they actually have a semi-truck option https://aws.amazon.com/snowmobile/

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

#200

Post by grogenaut »

jlgaddis wrote: post #184
enitihas wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Amazon updated their guidance to employees a few years back that we could share our own opinions freely online. That was after the but article and many happy amazonians pointing out they were hamstrung from posting their experiences online. It just seems smart from a customer trust and recruiting standpoint.

Don't leak material information or customer data tho. Which can make it hard as some of the best stuff is secret or customer related. Filters abound.

It was weird moving to twitch which was default open before this switch as the two policies were in conflicts.

I think this is better overall. And I enjoy the insights from aws folks and gcp, and the sparring that goes on.

I don't know anyone who went to Oracle cloud and was happy, but apparently they can't share their opinions

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