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Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

I really hope that when the dust settles and they have time to do so, they share lessons learned in the past year.

Well now this would get all the infrastructure guys enraged when they hear that they (Zoom) proudly rely on Oracle's infrastructure, to scale to millions of users [0]

Let's wait until the first person asks if they use 'Kubernetes' yet.

[0] https://www.oracle.com/customers/zoom.html

They use multiple services including AWS, Oracle, Azure, and their own data center.

https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/most-zoom-runs-aw...

Not to (surprisingly) knock Oracle, but at this point halo cloud customers are "Which provider is willing to cut their own throat on pricing to be able to say they host us?"

They use Oracle as in Oracle Cloud. Not Oracle database.

They talked about it before, must have got a great deal from Oracle trying to push their cloud aggressively against AWS. Zoom is global and multi cloud so it makes sense to get a few more datacenters if they're served on a plate.

"Already, Zoom is transferring upwards of seven petabytes...through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers"

Guessing egress discounts are what drives Zoom's picks for infrastructure.

If you think it's wise to just rely on one cloud technology as supreme, it is only a matter of time before that lesson teaches itself.

Unfortunately, the same incentives that keep us from both developing or government requiring/legislating that the underlying capabilities, i.e., video/audio conferencing, be interoperable (i.e., you can call people on GoToMeeting/Teams from Zoom, or vice versa); will also likely prevent them from putting out any good information on these events. Video conferencing is yet another example of a monopolist trying to take the whole market.

I realize that the old internet of distributed services and actual competition is likely something those who grew up in the facebook world will not even have a conceptual understanding of, but all of the monopolistic type centralization of services (everyone on Zoom, everyone buying from Amazon, everyone using Uber, everyone getting information through Google, etc.) is immensely dangerous, to a degree that simply cannot be overstated. Its digital, literal monoculture, where one event can have devastating cascading impacts.

In many ways the current virus situation is precisely that, a devastating impact due to a monoculture created and pursued by globalism, where diversity is destroyed and everyone is an equal and controlled human entity. The very crowd that is always demanding "diversity", is also the crowd destroying actual diversity by destroying differences and trying to turn us all into the same, equal thing.

Could it be that Zoom is just better, in the existing diversity of meeting tools, that makes more people use it? It offers good support for large rooms, is intuitive to use and all in all, "it just works".

Imagine having that same perspective on telephone or cellular networks - a world where you could only call other people on the same provider network, or tackle some obscure proprietary bridging system if you wanted badly to call beyond that horizon.

Nobody would accept that. Yet for video calling we’ve gone down a path where it’s normalised. Yet the underlying technologies are not so different to those used for traditional audio calling, video codecs and audio codecs and transports for them can mostly be treated the same.

I dunno, I realise this is somewhat of a tangent to your point but I think about it a lot and it bugs me to imagine how it could have been if we went the other way. Feels a bit like how large infrastructure project don’t seem to be possible like they were 40 years ago... something makes it that much less likely that a common good will come into being.

The difference between the phone provider and Zoom/Hangouts/etc is that all you need to join a zoom call is install an app in about a minute, or follow a browser link and you're ready to go.

People want convenience. Tools are there to serve us for as little effort from our end as possible. Zoom does that. And even for audio calls, people will often prefer private gardens like WhatsApp, FaceTime, Skype or whatever to simply avoid the cost of a carrier call because you can't beat free and easy.

>The very crowd that is always demanding "diversity", is also the crowd destroying actual diversity by destroying differences and trying to turn us all into the same, equal thing.

The rest of your argument makes sense, but this part doesn't.

Not being beaten by police or being verbally abused because of your skin colour is the opposite of 'turn us all into the same, equal thing'

Those peopl just want equal rights. Is it that hard to understand?

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