Sadly 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?
"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."
Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
51–60 of 144 posts
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#52Evernote’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…
- https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#53I 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…
At list prices? Pretty much never. Nobody sane with installations like Evernote are paying remotely close to the published prices, though.
The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many valid reasons for smaller companies to consider cloud deployments, but I've yet to see one where it was the cheaper alternative.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#54I 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…
"Could they set up a datacentre as an independent subsidiary that they were client to, but that was run on a commercial basis for other customers too?" i.e. commercially viable.
If the answer is "Yes" as it was for Amazon years ago, then it seems like a no-brainer - do it yourself. Otherwise, such decisions calls for greater scrutiny. For example, should HR services be run internally, or outsourced. Outsourcing some functions don't work even they're more expensive on first analysis, like the network effects internal HR can have, or the answer may be "No" for some services, Payroll a common example.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#55I 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…
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…
You certainly can burn through ridiculous amount of money if you insist on purchasing servers outright and pick expensiv brands.
Conversely, the "private cloud" deployment I run are mostly rented servers with month-to-month contracts. No upfront infrastructure spend - we grow them a server at a time. We also run some bare metal setups and they're generally cost-competitive with rented servers, but there it certainly depends on the size of the installation.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#56Guess 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…
We usually cut peoples fully loaded costs in two or more by moving them to dedicated hosting. Far more if they're bandwidth intensive (Google and AWS charge in the region of 5x to 50x as much for bandwidth as most other hosting alternatives)
There is certainly segments that use a lot of disposable environments and complex services where it makes sense to go to cloud providers, but I've yet to see a client where it came out as the cheapr option.
If they're big enough to negotiate steep discounts, then that certainly changes - I know one company that has 75% discounts over the public prices from one of the major cloud providers, and they're not that large (yearly spend in the high six digits).
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#57I recently set up a consumer grade LG Android smartphone. A few days later I got a push notification inviting me to install Evernote[1]. I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google? How does one unsubscribe from such app adverts? By disabling Google Play Store notifications? I really didn't know push ads for apps are a thing. Besides the annoyance, it seems like an unfair advantage over all the other top apps.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#58Please excuse the loose relation to this specific aspect of their relationship, but there's something bothering me about Google & Evernote. I recently set up a consumer grade LG Android smartphone. A few days later I got a push notification inviting me to install Evernote[1]. I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google? How does one unsubscribe from such app adverts? By disabling Google Play Store notif…
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#59Please excuse the loose relation to this specific aspect of their relationship, but there's something bothering me about Google & Evernote. I recently set up a consumer grade LG Android smartphone. A few days later I got a push notification inviting me to install Evernote[1]. I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google? How does one unsubscribe from such app adverts? By disabling Google Play Store notif…
Almost certainly the OEM (LG) or the telco. I have seen a lot of bundle/notification/ad deals from both types of entities, but never from Google.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#60Earlier 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…
Building/running your "own" cloud doesn't require owning bare metal servers. You can rent and lease for a fraction of the price of renting cloud instances. Once you start paying up front of reserved instances, the capital invested tends to start stacking against you. You certainly can burn through ridiculous amount of money if you insist on purchasing servers outright and pick expensiv brands. Conversely, the "privat…
Which bare metal providers can you recommend? How much control do you have over your network?