Did they use another provider prior to the move, or self-host?
Last I checked, they hosted their own bare metal machines.
Correct. I've seen their cages.
Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
31–40 of 129 posts
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#32I 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 C…
Yeah. The exact same thing happened at Evernote. They hit a sales slump, new “corporate” management, cuts etc -> GCP.
The Ops people there were pretty proud of their infrastructure, but they took it to a pretty extreme level. I think they were racking their own stuff and even running their own routers etc.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#33Found some interesting contrasting statements from 2015 [1]:
> The company performed big data jobs early on in the cloud, using Amazon's Elastic Map Reduce service.
> “That [EMR] got us to a place where we think about what data we collect. At the time it was really inefficient from a cost perspective, but there weren’t any creative constraints,”
> The team eventually decided to bring it in house. “Our Hadoop cluster wields a huge amount of flexibility," said Rembetsy. "We can get a lot done on bare metal, and we know very much what we’re looking for. Cloud services, that’s where efficiencies fall away. Spin up and spin down doesn’t have the same value proposition.”
[1] http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/05/11/how-e...
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#34I 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.
There is so much more overhead with bare metal. There's an entire other side of building a web server that devs, thankfully, never have to see. OpenCompute [1] aims to standardize what that process looks like. To think that you can run bare metal, and do better than industry standards is naive IMO. In the end, if you're worrying more about anything than business logic, you're not really delivering value -- you're sol…
Cloud providers have to make money, though. You're doing more with bare metal, yes, but you're not doing much more (especially compared to learning how to use a cloud infrastructure effectively), and the cost may not be worthwhile. Generally, the cost of buying and running one server in a datacenter and staffing the ops team needed to keep the hardware running is cheaper than paying for a 24/7 server of comparable specs in the cloud. And if you're already running in a datacenter, it's extremely not obvious that the cost of moving your workload ever will be net profitable.
Of course, if you don't need comparable specs to an entire physical server (I do a lot of personal stuff on a t2.micro!) or don't need the same capacity 24/7, the math is very different. The cloud is definitely cost-effective for elastic workloads.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#35Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would be shocked if Etsy/Spotify/whoever else wasn't cutting a deal for a significant discount, getting these name brands on GCP is great PR for the platform.
You don't even need to be a name brand to get discounts.
Of course, but I'm sure being a name brand helps them negotiate a larger discount.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#37I 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.
There is so much more overhead with bare metal. There's an entire other side of building a web server that devs, thankfully, never have to see. OpenCompute [1] aims to standardize what that process looks like. To think that you can run bare metal, and do better than industry standards is naive IMO. In the end, if you're worrying more about anything than business logic, you're not really delivering value -- you're sol…
I think you're generalizing too much. The overhead for bare metal only exists for certain use cases and apps.
We run about 3 cages (~4k pieces of hardware total) for about a tenth of the cost of what we've priced out as AWS/GCP. This includes DC staff to swap/provision hardware, leases, capex, and our bandwidth contracts.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#38I 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.
With bare metal you pay for servers you don't use. Cloud is more expensive on the compute side but you can really scale on your usage pattern, also security on the cloud is way better that on bare metal.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#39I 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.
As with everything else, the prices will reduce over time. But to be honest: you are not the market. If you have a functioning, reliable infrastructure that isn't too expensive or PITA to maintain, you have a good enough infra and should continue using that.
If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud.
If you're a non-technical company with a small IT department that wants to have an online presence and/or build internal online tools without having to build out DC's everywhere, you would go with cloud.
I could come up with dozens and dozens more. Cloud isn't optimal for everyone, but it is VERY helpful for certain organizations.
Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
someone set their DNS TTL to ∞
Where are you going with this?
He saying that is the reason why it's going to take years; because their DNS names will be pointing to the same IPs forever and not move over to the cloud based servers.
It would of been funnier if you put a finite number, like TTL 3 years.