How Zoom, Netflix, and Dropbox are Staying Online During the Pandemic
Inside the efforts to keep the quarantined world’s popular internet services running smoothly.
March 26, 2020
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To fight the COVID-19 pandemic, huge swaths of humanity have transformed their daily routines. Offices and schools are closed, city streets are empty, and most people are trying to substitute as many of their normal activities as they can with internet-powered alternatives.
But cloud platforms of some of the most popular internet services the quarantined world is now heavily leaning on for work, socializing, and entertainment – Zoom, Dropbox, and Netflix – have so far had no major trouble absorbing the massive surge in usage.
That’s according to infrastructure leads for each of the three companies, who spoke as candidly as they could about the situation in a webinar Wednesday. Conducted over Zoom, the virtual event was organized by Kentik, developer of network monitoring tools which some of the speakers’ companies use.
That their technical infrastructure has been able to handle the surge and, importantly, a shift in traffic patterns doesn’t mean there isn’t a ton of work taking place in the background to ensure things stay this way.
“Last couple weeks it’s been all hands on deck,” Alex Guerrero, senior manager of SaaS operations at Zoom, said.
It’s also important to avoid overconfidence in the ability of the massive collection of independent networks that interlink to make up what we refer to as “the internet” to handle what may come in the future, as more cities around the world go on lockdown, as more employees get sick, and as infrastructure operators start feeling the impact of disrupted supply chains more acutely.
Network intelligence company ThousandEyes has been tracking network outages of ISPs, pubic cloud providers, unified communications, and edge services globally and has noted an upward trend in the amount of weekly outages between the second week of February and last week:
thousandeyes covid19 outages
Zoom Scales Up
To date, Guerrero’s team at Zoom has been focusing primarily on scaling up bandwidth in various places on its network. That’s meant peering with more carriers and ISPs, ordering more transit, and increasing bandwidth on existing interconnections, with a particular focus on doing more peering closer to end users.
“That’s mainly what I’m looking at: bandwidth and being as close to the customer as possible,” Guerrero said. “Our product can handle a lot of latency, but still, the closer you are to the eyeballs the better performance you’re going to get across the board.”
Zoom traditionally keeps about 50 percent more capacity on its network than its maximum actual usage, he said, and the team has been busy in recent weeks maintaining that cushion.
Being an Equinix customer has helped Zoom increase its network’s bandwidth, Guerrero said. The company has been using Equinix’s Cloud Exchange Fabric, the software-defined network interconnection platform, to a great extent to boost capacity, he said.
Zoom today is in 19 data centers around the world, and each facility is connected to the biggest exchange in the market it’s in, Guerrero explained. Now, however, its network engineers are looking at second-biggest and in some cases third-biggest exchanges in those markets to bring its network closer to more end users.
As usage goes up, the platform is designed to scale both network and compute automatically, “with very little human intervention,” he said.
Zoom uses a combination of its own data centers and public cloud (by Amazon Web Services) for its compute infrastructure. While it’s had some challenges quickly scaling compute in its own data centers, due to the lockdown-related “supply chain issues” (details of which Guerrero did not disclose), scaling compute in the cloud hasn’t been a problem.
Other than having to scale “a lot faster” than anticipated, “everything is kind of in our standard operating procedure,” he said.
Netflix Is Careful Not to Scramble
While Netflix runs mostly on AWS, its platform is also a hybrid, because it operates its own content delivery network. Like Zoom, it’s had no trouble scaling cloud capacity, but it did hit a snag last week when trying to get more servers into the ISP locations to increase the capacity of its CDN.
“We have had multiple fires at this point with our supply chain,” Dave Temkin, VP of network and systems infrastructure at Netflix, said during the webinar.
Netflix’s primary server manufacturer (whom Temkin did not name) is in Santa Clara, California, and earlier this month, when six Bay Area counties including Santa Clara issued a shelter-in-place order, Temkin’s team had 24 hours “to get as many boxes out of there as we could.”
Those issues have since been resolved by switching to a different manufacturing location, he said.
Otherwise, the part of Netflix’s infrastructure that delivers content to users has been scaling up as designed. Temkin’s team has effectively “pulled forward” its growth plans for the coming holiday season, he said. “We don’t feel like we’re stressing our cloud infrastructure by the current events.”
Things are different for the part of the company’s infrastructure that’s used to make content. “Right now (it’s not unique to us) most content production is shut down around the globe,” he said.
Besides the problem social distancing presents for shooting movie scenes, other big parts of the production process, such as post-processing, visual effects, and animation, are things you can’t simply do at home, because they require a lot of network and compute power. So Temkin and his colleagues have been busy searching for technological solutions to make at least some of those things possible for creators to do remotely.