I would pay good money to Evernote if they had a "backup all my data multiple times, removing all possibilities of losing anything". I would gladly pay for Premium if that was an option.
Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
61–70 of 144 posts
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#62Please 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…
Tap and hold the notification and Android will show you what app it belongs to. You can also view the most recent notifications in Android settings.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#63I 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…
> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? 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 val…
> 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.
The cost of a server isn't just the hourly/monthly fee for running it. It's also the cost of waking up at 3am to turn it back on. If you're managing your own bare metal then you have to deal with that one yourself and I can assure you it's never cheaper than the cloud unless you value your time at $0.
Sure you can save some money by running a server yourself but if your business it as the point where that's the deciding factor in being solvent than you might as well close shop.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#64Please 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…
It's LG. HTC used to (maybe still) do the same.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Interesting point. In my experience buy vs rent depends on the company size. Which bare metal providers can you recommend? How much control do you have over your network?
I recommend OVH.com. They provide bare metal servers in a semi-automated way and have locations in US, Canada and France.
For the type of application that I run, where our demand is not very elastic, I find it very cost-effective and more flexible (as long as you're comfortable with administrating KVM and ZFS). I also like that with ZFS, I can easily sync snapshots between providers at the filesystem-level.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? 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 val…
> 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. The cost of a server isn't just the hourly/monthly fee for running it. It's also the cost…
This is why you should run your entire application on bare metal (colo or dedicated) with failover to the cloud.
The benefit of the cloud is its elasticity. You can handle a 2000% traffic increase by spinning up VMs instantly; no need to wait a day or week or month for bare metal provisioning.
And you should do this! But once you've structured your application this way, you are already horizontally scalable. There is no reason the core of your capacity cannot be on bare metal, especially now that container orchestration platforms are bringing feature parity to cloud and bare metal. Only provision VMs for handling temporary traffic spikes.
You can generally predict traffic costs for next 1, 2, or 3 months. You can't predict traffic spikes as easily.
So why not invest in dedicated servers or collocated hardware, just enough to cover your expected traffic? Send any excess capacity, whether due to traffic spike or hardware failure, to dynamically provisioned cloud services. This way you capture the economic advantage of elastic cloud pricing while achieving full utilization of your capex investment.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#67I 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…
You know Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc and other major companies use CDN's like Akamai to deliver their content to users right?
Building a few data centers may not be not be hard and may be cheaper, what's hard is serving content fast and as close to your users as possible in the world. For that how many data centers could you really build?!
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#68I 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…
> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own?
Discovery Communications recently announced moving all infrastructure for linear broadcast playout to AWS to replace their data centres.
AWS re:Invent 2016: Discovery Channel's Broadcast Workflows and Channel Origination on AWS (MAE303)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iao7Zcq1-s
25:30 - Rationale, background 53:00 - Discussion of financial models, move from capex to opex
Keep in mind that the volume of data in terms of video assets for broadcast quality linear playout as well as numerous continuous high bitrate outgoing video streams is very large.
As they note in the video, their financial modelling showed that it made financial sense to move to AWS if it was "all-in", allowing them to fully close down a number of large data centres.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. The cost of a server isn't just the hourly/monthly fee for running it. It's also the cost…
This is why you should run your entire application on bare metal (colo or dedicated) with failover to the cloud. The benefit of the cloud is its elasticity. You can handle a 2000% traffic increase by spinning up VMs instantly; no need to wait a day or week or month for bare metal provisioning. And you should do this! But once you've structured your application this way, you are already horizontally scalable. There is…
At the dollar spend for the infrastructure for most apps, the labor costs of dealing with physical servers is not worth it. Saving $1K/month on infrastructure is meaningless if it costs me $10K in labor costs.
Your numbers only work for the little guy when labor costs are discounted to zero.
Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform
#70Guess 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…
You also have to take into account the number of people it takes to run the data center operations in looking at the total costs. If they had 20 people required to operate running their own servers, that's probably around $2m/year in personnel costs, whereas they might be able to reduce that to, say, 5 people and save $1.5m just on that.