Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company • Hacker News Board

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#161

Post by lg » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:08 PM UTC

MichaelGG wrote: post #27

Bizarre. I've only tried to use Etsy once, figuring it'd be a great place to get some sort of unique jewellery as a gift. It's filled with junk, both of the super-manufactured kind and of the "modern art" kind (someone glues 2 pieces of crap together and wants $500.) I haven't gone back, though I did enjoy the Regretsy blog while it was up. >Etsy’s insistence on running its own servers rather than using cloud-based s…

i'll take the opportunity to plug my wife's hand-fabricated jewelry :) https://www.etsy.com/shop/PhetteplaceStudio

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#162

Post by smileysteve » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:14 PM UTC

nasalgoat wrote: post #157

smileysteve wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want low cost, you do your own servers for anything under 20 nodes. This seems unlikely to be true unless your software engineers love doing ops (and the needs of the business don't need those on software.) The salaries of having Operations that can replace failed hardware 24/7 (and w/ vacations) alone is more expensive than a company like Etsy should have in ops. Then there is the cost of the pipe, power, a…

Don't believe the lie that you don't need ops people in cloud. You're still running servers. So since you have the staff anyway, why not save 3-4x the cost? Hardware failures are far less common than you believe. I lost one hard drive in 10 years and because it was a RAID array it didn't even fail.

You still need software ops, yes, but not hardware ops.

> Hardware failures are far less common than you believe.

Your experience may vary; I once rented metal from Softlayer (running ~15 shards, about 60 boxes), we had a number of drives* fail, a couple of the rack controllers, some raid controllers, and one time a power supply over a 3 year period. On the worst RAID failure, we sent one of our employees across country to manage the recovery directly.

*Some hard drive failures related to 2012 Seagate 3TB drive issue. One failed within a week of being replaced.

Softlayer had a team monitoring our servers and working through issues with us; Other than supplier issues I blame them for nothing.

In that worst scenario; we ran off our geo redundant slave for the better part of a week.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#163

Post by nasalgoat » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:23 PM UTC

smileysteve wrote: post #162

nasalgoat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't believe the lie that you don't need ops people in cloud. You're still running servers. So since you have the staff anyway, why not save 3-4x the cost? Hardware failures are far less common than you believe. I lost one hard drive in 10 years and because it was a RAID array it didn't even fail.

You still need software ops, yes, but not hardware ops. > Hardware failures are far less common than you believe. Your experience may vary; I once rented metal from Softlayer (running ~15 shards, about 60 boxes), we had a number of drives* fail, a couple of the rack controllers, some raid controllers, and one time a power supply over a 3 year period. On the worst RAID failure, we sent one of our employees across coun…

I think you overstate the overhead for hardware operations. I had a team of five that managed over 1,000 physical servers in four global locations and they had to visit a datacentre maybe twice in three years. Other than for hardware installs which were always easily planned out.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#164

Post by HeyLaughingBoy » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:28 PM UTC

socrates1998 wrote: post #115

I thought Etsy already sold out? Everything I hear from people who sell on there is that it is loaded with Chinese mass produced crap? I am not sure if people see the contradiction of the platform, create a massive global online market place for handmade, unique expensive items. I mean, how could those two things every come into conflict with each other?

It's entirely possible, but I don't think it can be done in a "sell premade goods" way.

The seller needs to show that their items are unique by making them to order at a customer's spec. Keep prices down by not starting each item from scratch, but customizing a base product.

You make rings? Have a bunch of nice rings that you resell. Maybe even import them from China and sell on your store. But build your reputation by providing customized versions of those rings. Not by simply printing the buyer's name on them, but changing the type or number of stones, the metal, thickness, how the wiring is knotted, etc. Those are all ways to stand out from the high-volume crap and still keep the price reasonable.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#165

Post by tomsthumb » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:29 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #70

hueving wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>There are certain benefits of cloud or not, but this kind of thinking confuses me. Why stop there? Because using EC2/GCE infrastructure is an incredible waste of money if you have any reasonable-sized base-load and bandwidth utilization.

Most of the larger shops I've worked at have started moving away from hosted providers to save money. When you're starting out, hosted solutions will save you a lot of time. Running your own servers is a high cost and you need a dedicated team. But once you're pulling in that revenue and can afford it, running your own can save you some money and add a lot of flexibility. If you're starting out, I highly recommend no…

Looking at Terraform 3-4 months ago it really only supported AWS if you were doing anything "interesting", for some value of "interesting" which I can't pull off the top of my head at the moment.

Has that changed since?

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#166

Post by gedrap » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:30 PM UTC

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #123

valuearb wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I up-voted you because there is a lot of truth to what you wrote. But you also have to realize that today many businesses that don't understand how to develop software but still need to have effective software development processes. That's a huge personal opportunity if you are an effective communicator who can emphasize with managers from disparate backgrounds. They need someone who not only can implement and manage…

That's very true but it's not much fun.

Define fun. If rewarded, taking a team with shitty development processes, poor software, etc and taking it to the next level can be a great fun. But only if it is reward, i.e. is considered valuable.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#167

Post by s73ver » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:39 PM UTC

binarymax wrote: post #35

SomeStupidPoint wrote: post #6

The focus on eternally positive second derivatives is the cancer of American capitalism.

I'm not agreeing or disagreeing, since you have an interesting opinion, but in this case Etsy decided to play the game. They could have stayed private and done whatever they wanted without worrying about 'shareholder value'. They chose to IPO, they are now owned by the market. If you can't play the shareholder game then don't go public.

At the same time, if you disagree with what a company is doing, don't buy that company.

One of the things that angers me the most about people like Carl Ichan is that he believe that, just because he has money, he has the right to tell companies how to run themselves. Often times he buys shares in companies just for this purpose. Nobody forced him to buy those shares.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#168

Post by dboreham » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:46 PM UTC

shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

dboreham wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There has to be something very wrong when an article about the problems with a company that facilities an online marketplace is talking about the details of how their servers are run and paid for.. By this I mean that in such a business the issues surrounding servers and even software should be very minor compared to the bread and butter of helping people sell stuff so money is made. The costs of said servers and sof…

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

Oh, preachin' to the choir with that : my company's SaaS service is deployed across 10 or so tin boxes that I personally screwed together from Supermicro parts; humming in a faceless DC in Santa Clara with a backhoe sat in the far corner of the parking lot..

What I mean is : if you make a list of "shit that's wrong with my crafted good selling business", "how the servers are made" wouldn't be in the top 10 things to worry about. The fact that they're arguing that said servers should be sourced in a very cost-inefficient way makes it even more odd.

Consider for example this : http://www.zdnet.com/article/snapchat-spending-2-billion-ove... which, other than here, nobody seemed to question as strange.

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#169

Post by dboreham » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:48 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #119

shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

Except then you're stuck with a $15K server, and you had to spend all 15K up front. What happens when a component prematurely fails? Better buy two. What about the person-hours you spend with ISPs, CoLo provider, etc? You want network redundancy? Big ISP bills. Yes, cost per compute measurable (memory, CPU, etc) is higher in the cloud. But what's never mentioned when people complain about the cloud being expensive: a…

Yes you do need to know your shit. But that's true for all kinds of products and services any business buys. Someone has to understand the deep weeds Health Insurance at any company (in the USA).

Re: Etsy is under pressure to start acting more like a conventional company

#170

Post by shiftpgdn » Thu, May 18, 2017, 8:48 PM UTC

manyxcxi wrote: post #119

shiftpgdn wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except traditional "cloud" hosting is wicked expensive in comparison. Ideally you should shoot for a hybrid model where excess capacity spills into AWS/GCE/Azure. For example: A dedicated m4.16xLarge EC2 instance in AWS is $3987/month. You could build that same server for $15,000 through Dell, lease it at $400/month (OpEx), and colo it with a 1GB/s connection for $150/month.

Except then you're stuck with a $15K server, and you had to spend all 15K up front. What happens when a component prematurely fails? Better buy two. What about the person-hours you spend with ISPs, CoLo provider, etc? You want network redundancy? Big ISP bills. Yes, cost per compute measurable (memory, CPU, etc) is higher in the cloud. But what's never mentioned when people complain about the cloud being expensive: a…

That $15,000 server is leased across 36 months becoming an OpEx expenditure. On the accounting side this is no different than AWS. So let's say you buy two for failover.

A) Colo is $50-150/U with blended top tier bandwidth, 99th% billing and usually includes remote hands time.

B) Even with 100% redundancy you're still ahead by $3000/month. Please understand Amazon offers absolutely no redundancy built in and nodes go down regularly. It is up to you as a developer to build redundancy around the tools they offer.

C) Amazon doesn't take backups for you. You have to pay for this either way.

D) Again Amazon doesn't handle this for you. You have to pay either way. Buying an exact replica of the hardware I've mentioned and cololocating it elsewhere still puts you ahead by $3000/month.

E) What support do you need? Dell offers same day or even 4 hour parts replacement with the appropriate warranty service. Most Colos offer remote hands for free up to a certain hourly.

F) Lots of ways to handle this. You can use IPMI, built in OS tools, etc. There isn't much exclusive to AWS you can't easily replicate elsewhere.

G) I never said not to use Amazon for anything. In fact you should be building your applications for scaleability INTO the cloud. This is part of the idea behind the whole microservices movement.