Video has become mission critical for all aspects of society during the COVID-19 pandemic. The poster child for the rapid shift to online services has been Zoom Video Communications, which has seen its usage and data traffic soar during government lockdowns.
Zoom usage has exploded from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December to 300 million this month. During this time, the company’s stock has jumped from $68 at the start of 2020 to as high as $174 a share, valuing the company at more than $48 billion – more than the combined value of the seven largest airlines.
In a matter of months, Zoom has become essential infrastructure for businesses, schools and churches, occupying a central role in daily life around the globe as its video conferencing software provides connection for a socially distant world.
Although there have been some stumbles on uptime and security, Zoom has moved quickly to update its software and shore up its infrastructure, including a massive adoption of cloud services to support its video infrastructure.
Sunday Morning Becomes Prime Time
There’s no good time for an online service to experience an outage, but access problems on a Sunday morning are usually less problematic than during prime business hours. Yet the service problems experienced by Zoom last weekend illustrate how the world has changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Users experienced problems with Zoom Sunday, with many reporting difficulty logging in, while others could not start their video or audio. The timing was a major problem for thousands of churches, which are now delivering their worship services in a virtual setting via online platforms. Zoom’s secret sauce has been its ease of use, which has made it especially popular among churches. As many churches turned to Zoom for live-streaming, Sunday morning became prime time for a key group of Zoom users.
In a matter of months, Zoom has become essential infrastructure for businesses, schools and churches, occupying a central role in daily life around the globe as its video conferencing software provides connection for a socially distant world.
“It would appear the UK church has broken Zoom this morning,” author Lynn Robertson Hay tweeted. As the problems rolled over to the U.S. one rector wrote that having technical challenges delay worship “felt like a gut punch.”
The ability to rapidly scale a resource-intensive service is one of the biggest challenges in Internet operations. Here’s a look at how Zoom scrambled to add capacity to embrace its new central role in the pandemic economy.
The Foundation: Colocation at Equinix
Zoom was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, former VP of Engineering at Cisco Systems and a key player in the development of WebEx, the conferencing software acquired by Cisco in 2007.
As the new player on the block, Zoom has had to build its infrastructure from the ground up, unlike competing services from Microsoft (Teams), Google (Meet) and Cisco (Webex) that rise atop massive global networks.
The company currently uses 17 data centers around the world to manage its data traffic, as well as major cloud computing platforms.
“At Zoom we use a mix of cloud technologies as well as our own data centers to help deliver the service,” said Brendon Ittelson, Chief Technology Officer at Zoom, in a recent video. “We do use AWS, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and Azure as well as our global data center network of colocation (sites) that we manage.”
Most of the company’s colocation infrastructure is housed at Equinix, which has been working with Zoom since 2015. As of November 2019, Zoom had deployments in nine Equinix data centers – Amsterdam, Frankfurt, Hong Kong, Melbourne, New York, Tokyo, Toronto, Silicon Valley and Sydney. Zoom’s network featured two data centers in each of the Americas, EMEA and Asia-Pacific regions to create sites for reliable disaster-recovery backup.
Network cabling fills fiber trays inside an Equinix data center. (Photo: Equinix)
“Equinix has played a key role in Zoom’s success and its journey to accelerate international expansion,” said Oded Gal, Chief Product Officer at Zoom. “The global presence of Platform Equinix has served as a meeting point for various components of our infrastructure—from network to cloud providers.”
To enhance Zoom’s global reach, Zoom uses Equinix Cloud Exchange Fabric, an interconnection service that uses software-defined networking (SDN). The ECX Fabric allows Zoom to enable its enterprise SaaS and network service provider customers to directly and privately connect their networks, enabling the Zoom network traffic to bypass the public internet and establish private connections to its technology partners and customers in real time.
Zoom also operates in several locations in the U.S. in data center space operated by wholesale data center providers, including Digital Realty and CoreSite.
Zoom also has a data center in China, which has drawn critical attention amid the growing tensions between the U.S. and China over technology and privacy.
“Among our 17 global co-located data centers, we have 1 (one) co-located data center in China,” said Yuan. “This data center is in facilities run by a leading Australian company and is geofenced. Its design ensures meeting data of users outside of mainland China stays outside of mainland China. It exists primarily to satisfy our Fortune 500 customers that have operations or customers in China and want to use our platform to connect with them.”
Then COVID-19 Changed Everything
As the COVID-19 crisis began to spread beyond its early hot spots and take hold in the United States, conferences and business travel were cancelled and companies instructed employees to work from home. Schools and universities shifted to online curricula. Zoom quickly became the go-to video service for a distributed society.
“Just about everyone, it seemed, was Zooming,” Yuan said in a blog post. “Families, students, teachers, employees, healthcare workers, patients, everyone started connecting and seeing each other on Zoom. It is indescribable to watch something that you’ve built from the ground up help people in so many different ways. We ramped up to meet the incredible demand, working around the clock to add network capacity and provide support to everyone new to Zoom.”
That meant provisioning “massive increases in our service capacity,” said Yuan. “Prior to this crisis, we by and large used our own data centers to handle traffic. Due to the pandemic crisis, our own existing data centers really couldn’t handle the traffic.”
Zoom was already using AWS for some back-office functions, including pre-and post-meeting content. That scaled up very quickly, as Zoom provisioned up to 5,000 to 6,000 servers at a time from AWS as it began to expand its in-meeting video capacity.
More Cloud, Now
In early May, Zoom added more cloud capacity through a deal with Oracle, which said it was able to quickly help Zoom scale up to using seven petabytes through Oracle Cloud Infrastructure servers each day, roughly equivalent to 93 years of HD video.
The deployment at Oracle will help expand Zoom’s support of educational users. As schools shifted to online curriculum during the pandemic, Zoom decided to eliminate the 40-minute limit for K-12 schools. Oracle said that its engineering team worked quickly to help Zoom add enough cloud capacity to serve the hundreds of thousands of students and teachers flocking to its service.
“Video communications has become an essential part of our professional and personal lives, and Zoom has led this industry’s innovation,” said Oracle CEO Safra Catz. “We are proud to work with Zoom, as both their cloud infrastructure provider and as a customer, while they grow and continue to connect businesses, people and governments around the world.”
