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Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

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Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#11

Post by sjeanpierre »

codingdave wrote: post #4

> Etsy's transition to the Google Cloud Platform is expected to be complete within the next two years. I have no idea what Etsy looks like internally, but that sounds like an awfully long time in this day and age. Anyone have an inkling as to why this is a multi-year project?

I'd imagine that the move would require some re-engineering of their services to make the best use of GCP. I'd also imagine that their would be a non-trivial migration process to ensure uptime is maintained and customers are not impacted during the move.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#12

Post by sitharus »

codingdave wrote: post #4

> Etsy's transition to the Google Cloud Platform is expected to be complete within the next two years. I have no idea what Etsy looks like internally, but that sounds like an awfully long time in this day and age. Anyone have an inkling as to why this is a multi-year project?

Having worked for two companies that have shifted to cloud providers, multi-year timescales is fairly usual even just for like-for-like migrations. You can’t just shut down the servers, image them and start them in the cloud, you need to have a plan to progressively migrate services while maintaining site operation.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#13

Post by foobarbazetc »

I love GCP but honestly have no idea how these big internet properties can make the $ case for “the cloud”, unless they’re also planning to fire 90% of the Ops/SysAdmin team (ala Evernote).

We run on bare metal and to move to GCP would triple our hosting cost, not including bandwidth (which is free* for us).

Do people get discounts for doing PR? I’m really curious.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#14

Post by Something1234 »

tty7 wrote: post #7
codingdave wrote: post #4

> Etsy's transition to the Google Cloud Platform is expected to be complete within the next two years. I have no idea what Etsy looks like internally, but that sounds like an awfully long time in this day and age. Anyone have an inkling as to why this is a multi-year project?

someone set their DNS TTL to ∞

Where are you going with this?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#16

Post by merb »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #13

I love GCP but honestly have no idea how these big internet properties can make the $ case for “the cloud”, unless they’re also planning to fire 90% of the Ops/SysAdmin team (ala Evernote). We run on bare metal and to move to GCP would triple our hosting cost, not including bandwidth (which is free* for us). Do people get discounts for doing PR? I’m really curious.

most cost cuts come from automation (as you already noticed). but not just more automation in ops/sysadmin space, but mostly because you can just free resources you don't need. especially one-off jobs (analytics, etc.) take a huge amount of resources for a very short amount of time and after that time the resources aren't needed. on clouds you can hope to schedule them preemtivly.

also most cost savings come at night, if you are not active on the whole globe you probably only need half of your resources at night. even if your global the chances are high that at some time you still need way less resources. etsy is a marketplace on most marketplaces there are times where demand is really high and demand is certainly not so high. (christmas, black firday, regressions, etc..)

also if you self host, high availability can and is a pain. monitoring your database is a pain, it takes a huge amount of time, which most companies do not have.

p.s. working at a small company and services like RDS/gcloud postgres! (thanks google) google buckets (not sure how they are called their name is not as cool as s3)/S3 are a huge win for us.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#17

Post by stfwn »

illumin8 wrote: post #9
merb wrote: post #2

wasn't etsy the company that was using amazon and shifted back to their own infra because they said cloud is not as cheap as own infra?

No, they've always self-hosted on bare metal.

What's the difference between self-hosting and self-hosting on bare metal?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#18

Post by jbob2000 »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #13

I love GCP but honestly have no idea how these big internet properties can make the $ case for “the cloud”, unless they’re also planning to fire 90% of the Ops/SysAdmin team (ala Evernote). We run on bare metal and to move to GCP would triple our hosting cost, not including bandwidth (which is free* for us). Do people get discounts for doing PR? I’m really curious.

GCP is an operational expense, whereas bare metal is operational + capital expense. It might be more expensive for cloud, but the accounting looks a little cleaner.

I worked for a company that had bare metal. They were always shipping parts around, lots of movement back and forth between the data center, lots of night deploys for ops team which meant a burden on the HR department. There was a general anxiety about security.

It might be "cheaper" on paper to run bare metal, but it means your managers and executives have to make a lot of dinky little decisions all the time. I'd happily pay more to "push and forget".

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#19

Post by geofft »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #13

I love GCP but honestly have no idea how these big internet properties can make the $ case for “the cloud”, unless they’re also planning to fire 90% of the Ops/SysAdmin team (ala Evernote). We run on bare metal and to move to GCP would triple our hosting cost, not including bandwidth (which is free* for us). Do people get discounts for doing PR? I’m really curious.

I don't have very detailed knowledge, but my impression is that this move doesn't make long-term financial sense for the company, but it's being pushed by activist investors / board members who want to appear like they're good stewards of money because investors think cloud is cheaper / etc. (Note that this is on investors.etsy.com, not their tech blog; you can also find a call for public cloud in the Black & White Capital letter, in the NYTimes story from a couple weeks ago, etc.) I heard some rumors about this when I was applying for a job right before the layoffs happened, and I didn't hear anyone expressing interest in moving out of their datacenters before the layoffs.
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