Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

blog.evernote.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 144 posts

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#81

Post by awinder »

chatmasta wrote: post #66
koolba wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

You'd have to price in the cognitive load for engineering for that setup, and the recruiting costs / turnover costs for anyone that had to be exposed to the colo center. Also, the colo center! Speed & reliability are features, so you'd have to make sure to pick a colo center that had a competitive setup in terms of peering & backbone speeds, power redundancy, etc. Ideally you'd also be in more than 1 colo unless the cloud is acting as a backup datacenter, so you'd need staff in more than 1 region, lest you fall victim to something like the flooding in NYC and the colocated services that fell down during hurricane sandy.

You'd need to price in continued investment into that colocated hardware too, parts break down, cyclical improvements to hardware happen, etc. It's not simplistic at all, maybe there's money to be saved, but unless your hosting costs are really dragging down profit, I'd pinch pennies elsewhere personally.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#82

Post by fuzzybeard »

chatmasta wrote: post #74
koolba wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Renting a dedicated server requires no labor cost of your own (if a drive fails, your provider replaces it), and is almost always cheaper than the equivalent cloud resource, especially when it comes to bandwidth.

That still leaves sysadmins that you no longer need when using the cloud. The cloud allows your developers to run free without the need for infrastructure and sys admin teams to worry about the servers.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#83

Post by fuzzybeard »

rubber_duck wrote: post #26
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…

>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.

Reminds me of the "buying locally grown food" argument that's premised on the assumption that buying locally grown food requires less carbon emissions because the food doesn't have to be transported from far away. HOWEVER that argument ignores that even after factoring in transportation, those larger industrial farms are farm more efficient than your local farm. So even with transportation the industrially sourced food might be more carbon efficient.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#84

Post by yeukhon »

aluminussoma wrote: post #15
yeukhon wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most straightforward is running aws s3 command but as you noted it's single threaded, slow as hell. Imagine you have 100TB of data to migrate from one bucket to another. If the command encounter an error (which is very likely to happen), you have to start again. I think the only other option left is use Spot Fleet EMR. I believe the S3 API takes a marker for pagination so you can probably keep paginate to list th…

I did try EMR + s3distcp a while ago. AWS Support recommended it and provided instructions in their docs. It was not very fast for me. The data I was trying to copy was about 400 GB of small 5-20 kb files - not ideal for fast copying. I gave up and used a different method. I suspect Evernote, if using S3, would have a similar data profile of many small objects.

Do you think you can share with the public this different method? If not, I completely understand.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#85

Post by cobookman »

chatmasta wrote: post #66
koolba wrote: post #63

Earlier 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…

Data has weight. You'd need to duplicate some portion of your data between on premise and cloud. I feel the better approach is doing 100% on cloud compute with bare metal CDN / reverse proxy

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#87

Post by 20years »

vidarh wrote: post #56
StreamBright wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I regularly move people off cloud providers once they realise how expensive they are. 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 w…

^ This. I recently moved a bandwidth intensive app off of AWS to a LiquidWeb dedicated server and have been able to save over 50%. The cloud is not the cheapest option and not always needed for small/medium sized businesses/apps.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#88

Post by koolba »

cobookman wrote: post #85
chatmasta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Data has weight. You'd need to duplicate some portion of your data between on premise and cloud. I feel the better approach is doing 100% on cloud compute with bare metal CDN / reverse proxy

> Data has weight.

I like this line.

It makes it easier to picture the cost (in time, energy, and architecture) to support it moving from local to the clouds.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#89

Post by 20years »

fuzzybeard wrote: post #82
chatmasta wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Renting a dedicated server requires no labor cost of your own (if a drive fails, your provider replaces it), and is almost always cheaper than the equivalent cloud resource, especially when it comes to bandwidth.

That still leaves sysadmins that you no longer need when using the cloud. The cloud allows your developers to run free without the need for infrastructure and sys admin teams to worry about the servers.

Very little sysadmin needed if you go with a managed dedicated server provider. They pretty much take care of most of that for you. A little more expensive than a non-managed dedicated server but oftentimes still much cheaper than the cloud. Plus, you can't really completely get away from sysadmin when working with the cloud either. You actually get a lot less support than you do with a managed dedicated server provider.

Note: I heavily use AWS and managed dedicated servers.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#90

Post by yeukhon »

origami777 wrote: post #12
yeukhon wrote: post #6

So a large part of choosing GCE is possibly because CEO was a Googler and he was very familiar with how Google works and his contact at Google helped him scored a better negotiation and possibly even better support. Although I won't deny GCE team would snatch Evernote regardless because it's an important client to show off in GCE's client portfolio. > The decision to go with Google over another provider like AWS or A…

I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Free donuts. That's how you influence and win enterprise accounts.

Evernote didn't get everything for free. They still pay Google with some NDA stuff in the contract (better support, better pricing model, some free stuff here and there). I wouldn't have a second doubt the CEO's past employment at Google influenced the decision. After all, he had to sign it.
Post reply on HN