>Right now, the company is still in the process of migrating the last of its users’ attachments to GCP. I wonder if Evernote users can tell if they are on GCP or the previous infrastructure. I suspect not.
evernote user. cannot tell.
Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
21–30 of 144 posts
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#22Running a datacenter is still a hard problem to solve. Evernote just realised that.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#23Running a datacenter is still a hard problem to solve. Evernote just realised that.
Infrastructure is always messy:
http://www.dourish.com/publications/2007/BellDourish-Yesterd...
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#24Evernote’s engagement with Google engineers was a pleasant surprise to McCormack. The team was available 24/7 to handle Evernote’s concerns remotely, and Google also sent a team of its engineers over to Evernote’s facilities to help with the migration. Those Google employees were around to help troubleshoot any technical challenges Evernote was having with the move. That sort of engineer-to-engineer engagement is som…
Google does not have any engineers in the countries where are company operates or has contractors. Many people on HN are not from the US or not from locations having this option, so most of our judgment comes from using the online help or having a call with Amazon/Google/MS. Based on my experience, I still think Amazon wins. I bet it was really helpful for Evernote to get such a support though.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#25Guess Evernote are prepping for a sale/IPO? Moving into the cloud at this stage doesn't make any sense otherwise.
Why would it not make any sense? They probably did an analysis on this and decided that GCP overall is a better solution to their problem.
I regularly move companies to the cloud because they cannot afford to setup their on services and just want to focus on the business side of tech and write software only that delivers business value. These companies tend to use queue services, CDNs, scalable file stores, clustered database servers, disposable environments for research. If they had to operate these services, it would be a horrendous cost and huge amount of effort to set this all up and keep it running. Cloud vendors to these things for a reasonable price and it is ready to be used today. I find it very hard to think of any scenario where cloud does not win the game, this is why Google and Microsoft is betting on it.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#26I can understand that a company wants to do away with the distraction of having to worry about running a datacentre but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost. Now it may be that even if more expensive, it is a better use of your capital (renting instead of owning so that you can…
>Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost.
Only if you can do it more efficiently than them. If they are more efficient then they can make a profit and you still save money.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#27Nice Google ad, well done!
> Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud
Evernote _is_ part of the cloud. Buzzzz
> Evernote houses a large amount of unstructured data, and the company is looking to do more with machine learning.
Meaning private data? Is this covered in the TOS? Can I influence the usage of my data by Google before migration?
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#28I can understand that a company wants to do away with the distraction of having to worry about running a datacentre but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost. Now it may be that even if more expensive, it is a better use of your capital (renting instead of owning so that you can…
>Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost. Only if you can do it more efficiently than them. If they are more efficient then they can make a profit and you still save money.
Only if they are so efficient that after they get their cut, it's still more efficient than rolling your own.
Because these cloud services have inherent lock-in, they don't have enough incentive to keep margins low. Indeed, Amazon's margins are extremely high after factoring in bandwidth costs.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost. Only if you can do it more efficiently than them. If they are more efficient then they can make a profit and you still save money.
Only if they are so efficient that after they get their cut, it's still more efficient than rolling your own. Because these cloud services have inherent lock-in, they don't have enough incentive to keep margins low. Indeed, Amazon's margins are extremely high after factoring in bandwidth costs.
Agree, but that's my question. Does the savings achieved by these cloud providers more than offset their margin, or is the motivation to move to the cloud solely a return on capital / removing a distraction?
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#30Sadly the article never describes HOW they transfer the data. Simply sending 3PB on the wire will cost a fortune. Maybe Google does have some non-public service like AWS Snowball?
You may have seen this story a few days ago, where a summer intern project at Google saved 1.5PB per day:
https://students.googleblog.com/2017/02/intern-impact-brotli...
Since this would be a simple connection from Evernote's existing location to Google, I don't think the cost would be a significant factor.