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.
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 is as far as running a data center as living in an apartment is to building and managing apartment buildings.
(Fun Fact, while Amazon does own and run its own data centers in most places, they're also colocating with Equinix in some regions (though I assume their level of colocation goes beyond traditional colocation)).
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 company. You can also get on the Equinix exchange and connect to many more.
But, Equinix charges you a huge premium for this, typically 2 - 3x other providers for space and power. Also they charge about $300 per month per cross connect.
So your network backbone tends to have a POP here, and maybe you put some CDN nodes here, but you don't build out significant compute. It's too expensive.
On the cheaper, but still highish quality end you have companies like CoreSite, and I'm pretty sure AWS has an entire building leased out at the CoreSite SantaClara campus for portions of us-west-1. (Pretty sure because people are always cagey about this kind of thing.)
I also know that Oracle cloud has been well know for taking lots of retail and wholesale datacenter space from the likes of CoreSite, and Digital Reality Trust, because it was faster to get to market. This is compared to purpose build datacenters, which is what the larger players typically do.
In the case of AWS, I know they generally do a leaseback, where they contract with another company who owns the building shell, and then AWS brings in all their own equipment.
But all these players are also going to have some footprint in various retail datacenters like Equinix and CoreSite for the connectivity, and some extra capacity.
Zoom is probably doing a mix of various colocation providers, and just getting the best deal / quality for the given local market they want to have a PoP in. Seems like they are also making Oracle Cloud part of that story.
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 annually and if you fail to renew it which can take months, you are not in compliance and hence can't use the generators.
In India you can not start your own power generation plant and you can sell electricity only to the government. Depending on many situations you have to technically register a separate entity, get licenses as a "power company" then on paper sell the electricity to government and then buy it back from government for your own use.
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.
You can get around some of these operational constraints with technology. For example, Google had a server design with its own in-built backup battery supply, which incidentally could be cheaper than diesel generators. So backup power for your servers is solved but you still might need to figure out backup power for other parts of the datacenter.
Batteries don’t have anywhere near the energy density of hydrocarbons. Batteries are good for a few hours, but if you want to be able to run for days off-grid you will need hydrocarbons.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
Any scale where you get good utilisation of the metal. You can rent a dedicated 8 core server for $100/mo or so, 1Gbps unlimited usage. If you use it at full throttle it is literally under 1/10'th the price, often under 100'th of the amount you will pay for a cloud host and the thousand little cost addon's.
But the trick is you have to actually use it and need it in real time. An AWS instance costs you nothing if you don't use it, and almost nothing if you let them kill it at their whim.
Zoom's strategy looks pretty optimal to me. Take the 100 fold price reduction on your predicable load, farm the rest out to the lowest bidder.
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 we own. Otherwise it's just colo.
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.
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'.
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).
I would imagine most of that AWS colo is for hybrid cloud products (Direct Connect/Outposts/etc.). It’s obviously possible but seems unlikely they would run an availability zone in a space unless they had complete and exclusive control over the physical plant.
They use exclusive sections of an existing colo provider facilities, often called data suites or data halls at least in Australia, where the 3 AZs are split between numerous commercial colo facilities.
They get enough control through their contracts to make sure the hosting provider provides exactly what they need to spec.
Those mean AWS has networking gear in those locations. You order a cross connect and plug into one of their switches.
When you walk around in one of those places, you also typically see racks of AWS gear in a smallish cage with lots of hard drives. Typically a CDN pop.
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 work, and it's about compliance, auditing, risk management, electrical, plumbing, hvac and other skilled trades. The datacenter industry actually has very little to do with computers, so there is a natural split between the facility and the server / network equipment it houses.
Basically all commercial datacenter providers operate as REITs, which is tax advantageous but extremely limiting in some ways. Amazon can benefit from this (with lower pricing) without dealing with it themselves.
Owning can offer some advantages, but it also means you're with that site for the long, long haul. Efficiencies of designs are always increasing, so operating in an old facility costs you money. If you built the site to your own spec, good luck exiting -- the next owner will have to do a total overhaul to get it to industry spec and get customers.
Even if you have a 10 year lease, there are always ways to get out if you want to. Especially if you're Amazon.
They build sites, but they also lease space from the same providers as everyone else.
It's also worth noting that sometimes when a company builds a datacenter in a green field situation, it may be working with a datacenter provider on that project. So the company may own it, but they're paying the provider to use their design elements and potentially to operate it.
I’ve done big datacenter builds and cloud projects. The cloud projects were usually not a big win from a cost POV in my experience. Financially it’s a tax and marginal unit of capacity play.
Definitely easier to manage at a certain level, especially with variable demand or to accommodate growth.
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.
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.
> Hard to say what that means exactly, but it doesn't sound to me like Zoom is making a big bet on OCI.
So, which is it? Is it hard to say what it means exactly or is that Zoom isn’t making a big bet on OCI?
I can understand that you can be skeptical of a company deploying on OCI because of whatever biases you might have, but you’re making quite a leap that doesn’t add anything to the actual discourse on the topic.
If Zoom weren’t making a bet on OCI, they wouldn’t care to put this out into the media. They wouldn’t go on record and provide a quote if they were beholden to AWS or Azure. Zoom is a relatively small fish vs. AWS; they wouldn’t want to piss off their Cloud infrastructure provider for what you’re calling “not a big bet on OCI”.
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 stack is not reliant on cloud services like S3 etc, you're better off with a cloud provider who can give you those sweet deals. But you'll need in house expertise to deal with big data.
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 business has the chance to grow in coming years. They will literally buy your business for years on the bet that at some point they will make it back.
AWS used to offer huge incentives for startups that had investments from well known VCs. I didn’t pay for service for over two years. Now it’s only 100k and expires after a year.
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.
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.
I agree, but my point being the more tightly your infra is coupled with cloud services. The harder it gets to migrate. aws lambda would be a better example.
I am not sure if it is a good idea to host SFUs* fairly centrally in cloud data centers. Wouldn't it be cheaper to build a network of SFUs that deal with traffic as locally as possible? That keeps backbone traffic low and and cloud traffic costs sane at the expense of having to find all these colo sites. I reslly have no if AWS or GCP could even handle all that incoming and outgoing traffic in theory.
*SFU: selective forwarding unit - the node in a video conference call that receives and resends all the video streams between participants.
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 to it wouldn't be hard for them at all to come up with a product.
I migrated the company's services from AWS to OCI at the startup I was at. The trade-off is simple, if Oracle can say $product runs on OCI, they'll put you in front of the biggest industry players who are using their POS, database - and since our sales pipeline pivoted around web integrations this was crucial. They also give a bunch of credits (as do the other providers).
We argued against it in the dev team, but it wasn't the worst cloud migration I've done. The console reminds me of early days AWS as it's essentially just VPC+EC2+S3, but it was refreshing to spin up a server without a pages of config being presented to you. We took the opportunity to containerise our older sites and ran everything in their managed k8s cluster. I very rarely had to use the console for anything, which tbh is a bit of a grab-bag of managed services beyond the core cloud offering. Terraform support is there if you need to do anything serious.
My guess is simply, they don't want to fund their own competitors. Microsoft is a direct competitor already (so is Google,) and who knows what Amazon will do. That really only leaves IBM and Oracle. I've always been baffled when someone hosts on their competitors' platform. Like Netflix hosting on AWS, and Grocery Stores hosting on AWS. Microsoft & Google rarely have that problem (except on this one.)
I worked at walmart labs for 3 years and that is correct. We had one, on premise, service that phoned home for license information to an AWS address and our request to whitelist the ip address had to go up to the CTO.
In my last job we used Basecamp for project management and then we started doing work for Walmart. They flat out said if you want to use a SaaS tool then they have to sign a liability agreement in case any trade secrets were leaked. Needless to say they said no as did everyone else. Which forced us into self hosting a ton of stuff.
Walmart uses a few big SaaS providers it’s weird they singled out Basecamp and self hosting. I built a couple integrations to Walmart’s SaaS products. We used off the self SaaS products hosted in the clouds too.
Depending on how you define “store”, that basically means no AWS. This particular client understood this to mean no EC2, since data remains on disk, which cuts out the vast majority of the AWS offerings.
For this client the only AWS product we were cleared to use was Lambda, and only for integrating Alexis into the product.
Your random SaaS company is often a big shitshow. I've had more than one vendor Sales Engineer show me live customer data in response to performance or other questions. Startups and smaller SaaS companies in particular often demonstrate amazing levels of cluelessness.
We had an e-com SaaS company give us "sample product data" to help one our customers who was onboarding to their platform and was trying to figure out how to set up their product records and taxonomies, and the data turned out to be poorly anonymized real production data from one of our client's competitors who was also on the same SaaS platform.
That's pretty weird. AWS and Amazon's shop are two different companies. If they are afraid of leaking data, that two-hop scenario seems to be less of a problem than all the single-hop vendors they have themselves.
I used to work for a company that made POS and Self Checkouts. Walmart was a big customer and we had to make sure the stack didn’t have any AWS. Same with Target.
That, and likely Oracle is doing it for free (or thereabout), financing it out of their advertising budget.
Zoom is the success story of these corona-times of ours; the headline alone is marketing gold, particularly considering nobody else in the "startupsphere" will ever give Oracle this sort of visibility - or even the time of day. At a time when Oracle is trying to push an image of being startup-friendly, this is better than the alternatives (each word they tweet on "helping startups" unleashes waves of mean and snarky jokes).
> 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 was made to be mono-cloud until later. (Azure was used for storing backups.)
Note that AWS was never used for large-scale streaming. Either a partner CDN was used, or now their own CDN.
Thanks! And that makes complete sense - even for a company with that scale and budget, there's some fights not worth fighting when you can get back to doing what you do well and let someone else deal with the stuff you'd have to spend a bunch of effort getting good at.
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.)
I work primarily with grocery retailers, and this is quite accurate. Almost all of them have told us that they will not use any of our services if they are hosted in AWS. They used to be hesitant, but willing, but once Amazon acquired Whole Foods, it became a deal breaker.
If the amount of revenue you are going to give is a rounding error for AWS, you are not going to move the needle on the funding of their other projects. This should be a non-factor in your decision-making process.
Lots of insiders claim that amazon looks at its competitor's traffic and usage data for ideas. kinda like how grocery stores know which generics to make based on which types of foods do well.
You're right, in that the revenue of an incremental customer is negligible to them.
However, as a customer dependent on that particular vendor, one wants to make sure that their cloud provider has no perverse incentive to deprioritize issues one encounters.
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 that Oracle must be good choice.
So... Amazon employees are forced to use Chime for chat. It's crap for that and the Chime team doesn't care, it's not what their external customers care about.
Also, it's gotten much much better in the last 2 years. By the time I left, it's video was handily better than any non-zoom video chat I've tried, and competitive with zoom.
I use Chime and love it. Its lack of features is a feature in my opinion. I used Slack for years before using Chime and I’m happy with the switch. I don’t get nearly the chat fatigue I used to get from Slack. Chime reminds me of HipChat and Campfire in terms of UX but with the availability you’d expect an AWS service to have.
As someone who recently did the remote on-site via Chime, its stability left a lot to be desired. Audio dropped regularly and constant video freezes. It felt a little half-baked and dog-fooded internally and, by extension, externally to interviewees. Nearly every person who interviewed me also expressed some unhappiness with Chime as well. This is all anecdotal, of course.
It mostly just feels like a byproduct of not-built-here syndrome.
anecdotally, having used it internally before I left. I found that VC stability top-notch, I had some stability problems using the web client, but those had mostly resolved within the few months before I left.
I now find my self yearning for the stability of Chime outside of using Zoom. and using Zoom, feel a concern for my privacy in a way I have never using an AWS product.
This is incorrect. Apple doesn't buy chips from Samsung or TSMC. Apple orders the chips to be manufactured by them. The chip design is made by Apple on their own.
Buying a chip from someone (i.e., purchasing rights to use an existing chip design made by someone) vs. ordering your own chip to be manufactured by someone are two different things.
It's like, we don't say that Apple just bought phones from Foxconn, they simply acted as a manufacturer.
Sure, my point is just that it's not insane to give money to another arm (pardon the pun) of a company you happen to be competing with, and in fact it happens all the time.
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.
For starters, because Zoom's decision to go with either of those companies as a cloud supplier isn't going to have any impact on their competition as a conferencing service provider. It's not like Microsoft is going to go broke tomorrow and cancel teams if Zoom goes to Oracle.
More fundamentally because business is cooperative and not like a war, but like a game with many repetitions. So working with your competitors can be mutually beneficial. Business is not a zero-sum game, it's not like two villages in the walking dead going at each other.
Netflix and Spotify don't seem to have any problems. Cloud hosting is also at least a semi-important part of these businesses. I'm sure the contracts prevent outright abuse of the relationship, but more than that, if a cloud provider took advantage of that relationship, no one would host their again.
In a world of multinational conglomerates, it’s very common for a business to have a supplier that is owned by the owner of a competitor in a different line of business.
Bandwidth is one of their main costs presumably, and most cloud providers charge inflated egress prices (though for something the size of Zoom I'm sure they'd negotiate).
I should have worded my question better, I was just surprised why you would leave out arguably the top 3 companies and go with something like Oracle. (Maybe I am too young and that's where my animosity for Oracle comes from, but I feel like they are way behind the curve in terms of their cloud).
> Zoom already uses Amazon and Microsoft’s cloud services, but went with Oracle for its latest expansion.
Remember that Oracle’s Capex spending on cloud is very small compared to AWS, Azure and GCP. Given Zoom’s growth it’s not likely they’ll choose an also-ran in the public cloud market as their sole supplier.
Increasing optionality and maybe some access to Oracle marketing is likely a bigger reason.
> Maybe they are afraid that Amazon or Microsoft with their tradition of copying competition would pose a threat?
For Amazon marketplace merchants, I get how Amazon using internal metrics to start carrying popular products is a problem. For Zoom, though? They're public, and they announce quarterly usage numbers. There's nothing to copy that they can't already see.
I have no inside knowledge about this, but I'd assume and expect AWS to only use customer metadata like resource utilization for capacity management and planning. Much more and they run into compliance issues with things like HIPPA, SOC 2, and PCI.
Fair enough, I know the original article was about what you just mentioned. Still doesn't give them a pass to how they carry out their business though.
Probably less than that. The reason it's so popular is that it's easy to install, requires no sign up...and you can record the meeting. Skype, Teams, Hangouts, Slack, etc all have difficult processes to join a meeting (or signup/signin/install programs to get to it.) I honestly think that is why Zoom has succeeded. Then of course there are the caps on meeting space, but I don't think that is the main reason for its success. Almost all boils down to the amount of friction to actually get into something. Microsoft, IMO is the one that really bungled this. They should be dominating the space. They should just roll out something called "Teams Meet" that is effectively Zoom, where people can join from Teams (you're signed in) or a small program that requires no signup/sign in. Doesn't take a genius to figure out the appeal.
We used Zoom over Meet for 2 reasons. One, it had a big board where you could see all or most participants at once. Two, you could have larger meetings for free or a low cost vs. Meet. Recording ease was a big motivator but not a final deal breaker. Since then, Hangouts has added a big board style view that I've yet to test fully. On our next company meeting I will try out Hangouts and see.
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.
Nah we have zoom premium accounts. Kinda. You have to register it in this strange way, so half of us don't have these accounts. What this means is that if you start a zoom meeting with the premium account, you are a host and everyone else with the organizational premium account is a cohost. If you haven't enabled premium on your zoom, or you are a collegue from outside the org, the host of the meeting has to open screen sharing privileges for all guests. That button is found next to the share screen button, a small carrot revealing a menu with advanced screen sharing options. Within that settings menu is the toggle to allow guest to share screens. This is in contrast to most other host/guest controls that are found in the participants pane. These aren't the default settings, but we had to adopt these due to zoom bombings throughout the org a few weeks ago.
Of course it's zoom I'm talking about, come on dude.
The same way a startup chooses any hosting platform. They pick who their VCs tell them to pick because it's all a slush fund. Zoom's losses are another business owned by the same VC's gain.
The last time I checked, Zoom was a publicly traded company. Of course, this doesn't invalidate your second point due to the existence of large institutional public investors.
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?
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."
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.)
A lot of "they must be crazy" in this thread and I admit I had the same reaction seeing the headline.
However there are some options here other than "Zoom management is incompetent."
1. As others have pointed out, Amazon Google Msft all have competitive products and Zoom doesn't want to give them any more insight than they already have.
2. Oracle finally has a set of cloud products that are on par with AWS, GCP or Azure from a cost, availability, license perspective
3. They got a great deal to help Oracle change the way they do business so they can become competitive in Cloud
I don't know if any of these are true or not, but none are implausible imo
Additionally - I don't know if Zoom's backend is Java, but if it is - Oracle has a sweet deal on getting the Enterprise version of Graal for free if you run on Oracle Cloud.
I think this could be a smart move for a company to be the "big fish in a small pond" - even if that pond is owned by a shark with freaking laser beams....
Having experience with AWS, Azure, and OCI, I wouldn't voluntarily touch OCI with a 29½-foot pole. One of my company's software vendors uses OCI for the cloud-hosted version of their product, and we've had all sorts of random issues that make me really really really want to install the "on-prem" version on some Windows instances in our own AWS account. Maybe we're just an outlier and Zoom will have better experiences, but something tells me that given Zoom's scale the issues will only be amplified.
Given that it's an Oracle product, I can't imagine it being cheap in the long-run, either, so I seriously don't know what the value proposition is there. Sure, maybe Zoom got a good introductory price given their scale, but... eek.
Do people questioning the intentions of this move, have actual experience using Oracle cloud?
It seems that people really eat the marketing that AWS/GCP/Azure are the best cloud provider for every single product.
Oracle Cloud's perception is in the gutter, and it's all press. It's very possible that they have a competitive cloud service. They were making some decent offers for talent last time I checked.
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
Anecdotal but I've worked with developers of Oracle cloud who admitted that it was complete garbage. I also know DevOps people who have taken training for Oracle cloud and AWS and they told me they didn't know why anyone would actually use Oracle cloud.
“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.
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.
Why the hell would any business get into bed with Oracle if there is any alternative to it? That sales team is merciless, and the money will be extracted to the point that the victim is half dead, once the hooks are in.
The last few years Google Cloud sales reps have been much more aggressive. They walk in wearing Gucci loafers, talking about their MBAs, and telling us we need to spend 50% more this year. With the new GCP head from Oracle, I wouldn't expect it to get better, but glad to hear others are getting better treatment.
Oracle was one of the first major enterprises that converted to Zoom for all their internal communications. Maybe there was already some sort of connection or special relationship between the two companies early on?
Are the same people saying don't do GCP because Alphabet kills all products now commenting Meet is a valid excuse for Zoom to migrate to Oracle as a first choice?
Remember Salesforce is a big investor in Zoom. And they have a big partnership with Oracle. Most of Salesforce DB runs on Oracle DB. They might have influenced.
My understanding is that they already use AWS and Azure, so this probably isn't the case, but I wonder if the fact that the other major vendors have competing services influenced this decision.
Somewhat off topic, but I've found Zoom to have such better video quality then all the other big players I've tried that it leaves me wondering why, do they have some secret sauce for streaming that other don't?
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 I won't name, but scaling your instances required filling out paperwork and sending it in. Oracle wasn't quite that bad, but they're down there.
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.
Last worked with it maybe a year ago. I have a lot of SRE experience so deal with this stuff directly, and I'm giving you my experience and the experiences of my colleagues. It's anecdotal of course, but not unfounded.
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.)
Yes, we have a free $300 Credit and also Always Free Cloud Services just like other Cloud Vendors, give it a shot. (PS I work at Oracle). https://www.oracle.com/cloud/free/
I feel like it's relevant to mention that Oracle recently disabled all of the free tier virtual machines from every one of their cloud customers and after like a week of downtime with no public announcements, they were somehow restored.
So yeah, that should give everyone a pretty good idea of their reliability if they are not multi-million dollar customers.
I doubt you can do anything about it, but Oracle Cloud simply refuse to work with any of Russian credit cards. Registration simply fails at the end no matter what card is used and support send you to bank / payment provider and payment provider sent you back to Oracle.
I never had such problems with any other hosting company. I'm live between different countries so I registered it anyway, but still...
As I said in my post I just have access to cards from other countries too so I just registered that way. Though many of my clients are still in Russia and I guess they'll likely to have exactly same issue in case they decide to register account for their business.
OFC I'll try to do it again, but I wouldn't be posting on HN in first place if support would give anything like a useful reply.
Yes, I wouldn't recommend mail server on the free tier but bandwidth issue should not occur, which region are you provisioned for? That could be a factor. Anyways just contact support and someone should help you quickly https://www.oracle.com/corporate/contact/ (also try talk using the life chat on website)
Paint me paranoid, but I think this is a move by Beijing to get closer to Oracle, which provides support for (and thus has access to) many US Government databases.
> Zoom selected Oracle to expand its cloud, bypassing major industry leaders Amazon Web Services, Alphabet’s Google Cloud Platform and Microsoft’s Azure Cloud.
I guess GCP isn't significant enough to be in the headline
In the headline. The headline is "Zoom taps Oracle for cloud deal, passing over Amazon, Microsoft". Which doesn't contain any of "Alphabet", "Google", or "GCP".
(In my professional experience) Google is absolutely terrible at B2B, their support is sorely lacking.
(In my personal experience) Google deprecates products I love at a fast pace and have for many years.
For me, they went from an air of mystery like they were the "Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory" of shops to "just another software conglomerate", and not a particularly good one at that.
which customer-focused-product from google that you paid for that hurt you?
Look, I find their behavior pretty anti-consumer in some aspects too but relatively, they don't look bad.
We can talk about amp, controlling the web through blink and chromium, search, map and the list can go on.
But as I grow older, I think that's not how anything is going to change. Blaming the company is unreliable way to achieve what you hopefully want - a good competitive market with pro-consumer policies and behavior.
That won't happen with blaming google or any other company. People won't change either if you told them about AMP a million times everyday on every thread. This forum itself is an echo chamber in that sense as with other tech focused online groups.
Do you think you should participate in politics? Check up with your local authorities? And try to sneak in reforms that will probe up more competitors and improve the current monopoly?
The problem isn't that google is being anti-consumer more so that you don't have any way to reliably remove google as a dependency
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/zoom-cfo-explains-how-the-co...