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Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

blog.evernote.com

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Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#41

Post by yokisan »

quanticle wrote: post #4

Evernote’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…

I run a service on Firebase (now part of Google Cloud Platform) and ran into problems recently. To my surprise, the support was excellent. And I've only a few thousand users.

As for whether that level of support was acquired with the rest of Firebase or is native to GCE, I don't know.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#42

Post by neotek »

That was a surprisingly frustrating article to read. It kept repeating the exact same things just worded slightly differently over and over again, like the four or five times it mentions machine learning being a major part of Evernote's decision to go with Google, without ever explaining what, exactly, that machine learning would be.

The whole thing reads like a press release targeted at an audience that doesn't know anything about the actual mechanics of cloud computing.

Edit: Fortunately Evernote have published a great five-part series on their blog[1] which goes into much greater detail about the transition to GCS, although there's still no explanation of how machine learning fits into their future plans.

[1] https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#43

Post by TillE »

duncanawoods wrote: post #17
quanticle wrote: post #4

Evernote’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…

Option 3. This is PR and not a postmortem containing facts you can use to inform your decisions. I fear there is no journalism here. No attempt to uncover real motivations, nothing remotely negative, no dissenting comment from current/past engineers, nothing about who paid what to whom, the incestuous relationships of ex-Googlers (Evernote CEO is ex-Google), how much Google is losing to take on high profile customers…

And it's not merely a positive piece; those quoted paragraphs literally read like marketing copy.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#44

Post by eicnix »

yourapostasy wrote: post #36
eicnix wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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…

There were a lot of basic features missing. After 2 years of initial Openstack deployment there was no DNSaaS available and the loadbalancer solution was very unstable. This was partly caused by the organisation because nobody knew how to build a cloud system and first first few iterations of this private cloud were build like traditional bare metal infrastructure. If the investment for the private cloud had been used to adapt a public cloud provider for all non critical applications the benefit of the organisation would be greater.

There are tools like Kubernetes / Mesos that can help abstract the infrastructure layer so you can move between different providers. I have seen kubernetes federations setups between kubernetes clusters on AWS and kubernetes clusters that were hosted inhouse.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#45

Post by kristianc »

neotek wrote: post #42

That was a surprisingly frustrating article to read. It kept repeating the exact same things just worded slightly differently over and over again, like the four or five times it mentions machine learning being a major part of Evernote's decision to go with Google, without ever explaining what, exactly, that machine learning would be. The whole thing reads like a press release targeted at an audience that doesn't know…

That's more or less because it is - it's aimed at enterprise IT 'decision makers' with predominantly on prem stacks, and is a glorified marketing case study.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#46

Post by acqq »

cm2187 wrote: post #29
throwaway13337 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

It seems that their motivation was enabling the use the "machine learning" as they say or the "Big Data Analytics" as the user threeseed recognized in his post here.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#47

Post by abc03 »

Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud to help with features based on machine learning that it has been developing

I noticed there are other companies citing machine learning as a reason to move to one of the big three (Xero.com gave the same reason when moving to AWS). Could someone give more Background Information to this and what are the exact Advantages?

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#48

Post by diamondo25 »

abc03 wrote: post #47

Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud to help with features based on machine learning that it has been developing I noticed there are other companies citing machine learning as a reason to move to one of the big three (Xero.com gave the same reason when moving to AWS). Could someone give more Background Information to this and what are the exact Advantages?

Think of provide better suggestions, analyzing comments for quality and reach and other things you can figure out when you have loads of data.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#49

Post by acqq »

diamondo25 wrote: post #48
abc03 wrote: post #47

Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud to help with features based on machine learning that it has been developing I noticed there are other companies citing machine learning as a reason to move to one of the big three (Xero.com gave the same reason when moving to AWS). Could someone give more Background Information to this and what are the exact Advantages?

Think of provide better suggestions, analyzing comments for quality and reach and other things you can figure out when you have loads of data.

According to this article, they intended to analyze the notes taken by their users and also have their "employees read your notes so" they "can ensure that the machine learning is functioning properly" and that to "help you get the most out of your Evernote experience."

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

I believe that they simply wanted to enable the targeted ads or sell the newly generated data, and that they still want to do this. But maybe somebody here has more insight.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#50

Post by kuschku »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #38
cm2187 wrote: post #16

I 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…

> 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…

Even then, you can usually save a lot by renting dedicated machines, and running your own kubernetes cluster on top of them.

That option seems to have been entirely forgotten recently.

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