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Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

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Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#41

Post by tedmiston »

azurezyq wrote: post #24
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.

Operation cost is only one side. There are more things: * Well designed security / encryption may cost a lot. * Compliance may be a pain. * multi-DC and HA * Surge resource usage over holidays. * "Sleeping" resources at night or wasted.

Support for auto-scaling services in a self-managed environment too

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#42

Post by alexasmyths »

pm90 wrote: post #39
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.

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 wit…

"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."

I agree, but I don't think that's the market either.

I think the market is in massive big-corps, moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Like regular, non-tech companies.

Small startup bills might be hundreds, thousands, possibly 100's of K but probably not millions. Big corp contracts may be millions - and stable.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#43

Post by lykr0n »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #32
geofft wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Racking your own servers and running your own routers is extreme? I don't know about you, but I haven't set foot in the DC in two years after initial setup.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#44

Post by toomuchtodo »

alexasmyths wrote: post #42
pm90 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wit…

"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." I agree, but I don't think that's the market either. I think the market is in massive big-corps, moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Like regular, non-tech companies. Small startup bills might be hundreds, thousands, possibly 100's of K bu…

At megacorp scales, you're wasting money going to the cloud unless your load profile is highly variable. GCP/AWS profit margins are very high versus bare metal, and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years.

(and before you trot out Netflix, the vast majority of their bits are served out of OpenConnect appliances colocated at eyeball ISPs and peering points)

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#45

Post by manigandham »

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.

These calculations don't make sense unless you really consider TCO over any appreciable amount of time.

It's easy to say you can buy a huge server for a few thousand but the "cloud" provides incredible agility, security, and basically removes operational overhead. When compared to buying, maintaining, and decommissioning servers and software along with the time and personnel costs, it becomes a much closer race. Include global scale, elastic capacity, managed services, and support policies, and it's closer still.

Rarely are companies paying 3x IT spend just to run in the cloud, especially for large companies like Etsy.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#47

Post by bckygldstn »

josephhurtado wrote: post #46

It begs the question why Google Cloud and not MS Azure or Amazon's AWS? Could it be a price break they got, and also the AI advantages of Google Cloud's offerings? I am sure that played a big part.

Many retail companies avoid AWS because they see Amazon as a competitor.

Source: work for a retail company, we went with Azure.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#48

Post by spyspy »

sitharus wrote: post #12
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.

Truth. This[0] is how we did it for the NYTimes Crossword platform. It took a year and a half, but was managed with a team of only 2 people (myself being one of them).

[0] https://open.nytimes.com/play-by-play-moving-the-nyt-games-p...

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#49

Post by TheReveller »

bckygldstn wrote: post #47
josephhurtado wrote: post #46

It begs the question why Google Cloud and not MS Azure or Amazon's AWS? Could it be a price break they got, and also the AI advantages of Google Cloud's offerings? I am sure that played a big part.

Many retail companies avoid AWS because they see Amazon as a competitor. Source: work for a retail company, we went with Azure.

I think that certainly comes into it. Seems perverse to take the money you make from sales and give a cut of it to your competitor, who can then reduce the prices in their own store.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#50

Post by jermaustin1 »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #44
alexasmyths wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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." I agree, but I don't think that's the market either. I think the market is in massive big-corps, moving their IT infrastructure to the cloud. Like regular, non-tech companies. Small startup bills might be hundreds, thousands, possibly 100's of K bu…

At megacorp scales, you're wasting money going to the cloud unless your load profile is highly variable. GCP/AWS profit margins are very high versus bare metal, and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years. (and before you trot out Netflix, the vast majority of their bits are served out of OpenConnect appliances colocated at eyeball ISPs and peering points)

I recently watched a Mega Corp fire the entire IT Ops department and hire a handful cloud consultants to move all of their current vSphere (thousands of VMs) infrastructure to Azure.

The rationalization was that in the long run it was cheaper to maintain the status quo, and not have to worry about networking, firewall, and replication issues by hand. I'm pretty sure MS also gave them a large discount at that scale.

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