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Comment by thoraway1010 | Hacker News Reader

I think they have the experience, but the success has not always been great. I used to have a hotmail account -> not impressed with how microsoft managed that vs things like gmail (downtime etc).

Same thing during the early Office 365 days. These systems were rough.

Zoom and AWS seem to be handling scaling pretty well - I'm a bit confused though as to how much extra capacity it would make sense for AWS to be carrying or maybe they aren't being asked to scale the way microsoft is which is my guess.

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> I'm a bit confused though as to how much extra capacity it would make sense for AWS to be carrying or maybe they aren't being asked to scale the way microsoft is which is my guess.

AWS has a crapton of capacity. So much so that they were the first ones to come up with the 'spot' instance concept. We could easily get hundreds of spot instances most days, even in a popular region like US-West 2. Those were relatively big ones too, with a minimum 16 VCPUs and 64GB – but given the spot pricing, we would request even bigger ones if they were available. Even when they were terminated, usually we would get a replacement instance in a few minutes. Even faster if the fleet request was flexible and didn't need a particular instance type.

AWS will also honor pretty large quota increases without batting an eye, while Azure (and sometimes even GCP) would send similar numbers "for review" and take their sweet time.

I can only remember a couple of times, years ago, where requests for normal, on-demand instances failed to get satisfied, in a particular availability zone. But the other zones would be fine.

Most Azure regions do not even _have_ availability zones, so that's out.

AWS is bigger but I doubt they have seen the same type of change in traffic as I don't think they have the same traffic patterns that would be affected by something like this.

Teams was used before but suddenly in my company you had 100k office workers working from home and all meetings converted to Teams meetings, a lot with video streaming. People also seem to react by booking even more meetings now when the casual talk was gone (instead of chatting casually).

Isn't Zoom on AWS? So are Slack and Chime (the little known AWS competitor to Teams). As are parts of Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, and of course Prime Video.

I don't know the exact numbers but I'm pretty sure the rise in popularity of Zoom is just as high, if not possibly higher, than Teams. Entire universities of 50k+ students started using Zoom for online classes, not to mention all of the companies that have started using it. Then you have all of the people staying at home using the streaming services, etc... my guess is that AWS has seen a huge spike in traffic just as big, if not bigger than Azure saw.

>The software giant counted 32 million daily active users of Teams last week on March 11th, but this jumped by 12 million to 44 million daily active users yesterday.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/19/21186452/microsoft-teams-...

Zoom does not release numbers but they have seen an increase say in usage but if we look at estimated numbers:

>Zoom had 12.92 million monthly active users, up 21% since the end of 2019, Chrane and Isaacs wrote, citing data from privately held Apptopia.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/02/26/zoom-has-added-more-users-so...

Microsoft seems to have had an increase that similar to Zoom's whole user base in a week (and I don't know how much was added before that).

I think people in tech circles underestimate how many large non-tech companies just followed Microsoft into the cloud and started to use Office 365. And I assume a lot don't use it that much, maybe for a meeting here and there and a few (or way too many) channels but suddenly everyone in the company is on it.

> Zoom does not release numbers

Zoom released some numbers a couple of days ago:

“To put this growth in context, as of the end of December last year, the maximum number of daily meeting participants, both free and paid, conducted on Zoom was approximately 10 million. In March this year, we reached more than 200 million daily meeting participants, both free and paid.”

https://blog.zoom.us/wordpress/2020/04/01/a-message-to-our-u...

This seems wrong to me. Isn’t almost a third of the worlds traffic going through AWS? Think about all the video conferencing calls, streaming videos, and gaming happening now. ISP’s were almost crumbling in Europe last week. AWS is almost certainly experiencing more traffic the azure

> AWS will also honor pretty large quota increases without batting an eye, while Azure (and sometimes even GCP) would send similar numbers "for review" and take their sweet time.

I have so many bad experiences with limit increases on AWS.

I just went through one trying to get concurrent AWS Lambda executions increased from the default 1.000 in a region to 10.000. I had to open a support case, fill out an optional questionnaire (which turned out to be not optional at all), the support engineer had to forward the questionnaire to the AWS Lambda service team and they came back a few days later with: oh, you can have 5.000 concurrent executions.

Even worse a few years ago (not sure if that's still the case) we tried to get an increase of the sum of storage available as EBS-volumes. That took quite a bit back and forth with AWS and in the end we learned that they do reserve such EBS-storage for a customer no matter if the customer uses it or not. And mind: We didn't request something like guaranteed available EBS-storage, but instead just the ability to request more storage.

Yeah, this seems to be heavily service dependent.

EC 2 and ELB increases are relatively easy to come by, but for some services like Media Services things has to get reviewed by the service team which can take a while.

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