Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

First of all it is important to understand that building/running your own cloud isn't only huge investment and high risk but also comes high cost of opportunity because every cent you spend in infrastructure you hope will be cheaper is not spend to increase the real value of your product. Not making this investment until your organisation and IT are "cloud-ready" decreases this risk. I have seen companies invest more than double the cost of a cloud provider to build their own cloud without having access to the features that a public cloud provider provides.

For me the questions come down to the proportion of resources to revenue and how "cloud-ready" you are.

If all you are using Amazon/Microsoft for is EC2 style hosting then yes it's expensive.

But if you are interested in Big Data Analytics as well (as Evernote would be) then it is a bargain. It is very expensive to run your own managed Hadoop cluster, build the data ingestion and scheduling components, event store, NoSQL store, machine/deep learning pipelines not to mention AI technologies and have them all integrated and cohesively packaged.

Hm, but how much of those features they don't have access to would actually be used? After a few decades in the trenches, I've come to (mostly, kind of) accept that on average, most companies do not push the leading edge, and settle for relatively baseline feature sets of all of the software they use. As long as a deployment hits those feature points, they don't aggressively push for learning, testing, deploying and using new features.

This is of interest to me because no matter how I slice it, when analyzed from this "baseline feature" perspective, cloud solutions of conventional software that require deploying upon conventional platforms are expensive, and I figure I must be missing the picture. I'm much more excited about cloud solutions like AWS Lambda that de novo solutions are built around, as those do seem to have more promise delivering the much-talked-about 2-10X cost improvements compared to conventional software, but still at a high cost of vendor lock-in due to lack of cloud API standards adoption by vendors.

   >  is using one of the major cloud services cheaper 
   > than running your own? 

Depends on the size and to some extent the distribution. Above a certain size (and this varies based on the mix of memory, storage, and CPU cycles) it is cheaper to run your own stuff in a space leased from a data center. However that size generally has to be achieved at every data center you want to run in. For example, if your function was that it saves money above size 10, And you need 7 units in the US and 7 units in Europe, it is probably not cost effective to run your own even though your up to 14 units of capacity, but if you're running 15(US) and 12(EU).

That said, you still have to have the the operational expertise to run it and with that expertise will come an understanding of the actual costs. For example, at Blekko we were running 1500 machines in a data center and had just over 12,000 hard drives. Those drives are going to fail over time so you need build process around continually renewing the drives. You assume that you'll be able to get some replaced under warranty but you should also simply depreciate the cost of drives over 3 years. So you spend $110 on a drive, you depreciate it at cents per day. That is an "expense" you incur as you buy replacement drives. So your storage is "costing" you $36,000/month ($0.10 * 12,000 drives * 30 days). At the time it was the 2TB generation and our system used simple triple replication for data protection so it represented 8PB of data protected storage, of which, at any given time we were utilizing roughly 5PB. S3 from Amazon [1] is .021/GB per month so 5 petabytes (just what we were using) would be $105,000 per month (so roughly triple the cost). And there is the network 'in/out' costs which raise the prices further and you don't pay for your own storage. Most of our storage management costs (detecting bad drives, reformatting, scheduling for RMA) was done automatically but it did take an data center engineer one day each weak to work through the list of drives that had been determined to be bad, swap in replacements from the 'incoming' drive box, and put the outgoing into the 'rma' box (40 drives in the box) and once the outgoing box was full, print out the list of serial numbers and generate a standardized RMA to Western Digital and to then put the shipping label on the box. So in addition to the depreciation cost you add 20% of the cost of a date center engineer who is doing the mechanical work of moving dead drives out.

So you can cost it out this way for your own infrastructure and figure out which is cheaper, and for a lot of people it will be cheaper to run it in the cloud because you really don't need multiple petabytes of data or thousands of cores on line or terabytes of RAM. And some people build their systems in efficiently so that they are spending way more on people keeping them running than they might if they had designed them differently. glindahl had honed a set of scripts and tweaked Nagios bits that made running lots of machines fairly efficient but not everyone has someone like that on staff.

But the place where it is a real win, and I think this was the economic story that got Evernote to move, is that when you downsize your infrastructure needs it is trivial when you are in the cloud, and it is non-trivial when they are your own assets. Data center leases are generally multi-year and they are loath to let you sublet space or reduce space.

Since Evernote has been shrinking this makes a lot of sense for them, when their user base shrinks their costs shrink with it. And that is the "killer app" for cloud based infrastructure.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

> if you are interested in Big Data Analytics as well (as Evernote would be)

They seem to call it "machine learning" "to help you get the most out of your Evernote experience."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/evernotes-new-privacy-poli...

As one author once wrote "Whenever a company says 'In order to serve you better', you can be pretty sure they're about to do something that will make your life more miserable." I like the point of xkcd 1150 too. But Evernote actually does take money from their note taking customers.