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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.
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>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. But that's exactly what Etsy isn't. They've been around for years. It's a stable, mature business (at least by the standards of the sort of business they're in). What possible advantage could they gain from switching to this cloud?
Access to dozens of services that AWS offers, that you'd want to utilize entirely on their networks ideally. That service list is only going to keep expanding. The cost for Etsy to duplicate and maintain any of those, is high. AWS is also likely to be one of the leading platforms for AI services/tools, which Etsy will no doubt want to make heavy use of in the future; that's another expensive duplication effort if the…
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.
I don't think Etsy should consider itself as a competitor to Amazon, they simply can't. On the other side, AWS already has so many success stories that they are unlikely cater to Etsy specifically. That makes GCE the best option out there. As to Azure, I think people trust Google more as to cloud-based technology than Microsoft.
They have always seemed a bit disconnected from their customers. The first regime, Rob Kalin, Haim and Revolving Dork, had an age and culture disconnect from most of their customers. The next group, headed by Chad Dickerson and Allspaw, seemed like they wanted to focus on technology for technology’s sake, more than what Etsy was actually doing with that as a company. They even made some statements to the effect of how they wanted Etsy to be known as a technology company, like Facebook, and be a platform, like Amazon.
All fine and good, but so far, what all of the leaders of Etsy have had in common is that they don’t really understand what it’s like to be a micro business person selling handmade art online. If I was an investor, I wouldn’t want to be paying for a bunch of guys to experiment with Mongo DB search engines and shards. As long as they’re still not understanding their core business, it’s a distraction.
Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other.
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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.
There is nothing "extreme" about any of that.
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>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. But that's exactly what Etsy isn't. They've been around for years. It's a stable, mature business (at least by the standards of the sort of business they're in). What possible advantage could they gain from switching to this cloud?
Some executive will get to lead a big cloud migration project, which will look great on their résumé when they bounce to their next job a few years later. Oh, you meant advantages for the company ? Never mind.
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"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)
Don't assume this.
I worked at a 'big tech company' that made a very popular device.
Our IT was a disaster.
We made one of the world's most popular gadgety things - we couldn't make our email work.
Doing things the right way is extremely expensive sometimes, you have to pay zillions for consultants and they can screw it up.
If 'IT' is not a massive cost - often - the consideration is moot - move it to the cloud where things will work, and there is low overhead.
I'll bet $100 that Amazon is earning those margins easily.
Another example: why do companies use Windows instead of Linux which is free? Well, because Linux in a regular corp environment would be a huge nightmare. $50/employee to get something that works? That's dog-food heap. It's hardly a consideration, easy, just buy it. Maybe MS margins are huge. Who cares, because the value they created is monster.
Sometimes 'point and click' IT is worth a lot given all the risk factors etc. etc..
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.
Probably because Google extends really really good deal to them for the PR effect. I don't think Etsy should consider itself as a competitor to Amazon, they simply can't. On the other side, AWS already has so many success stories that they are unlikely cater to Etsy specifically. That makes GCE the best option out there. As to Azure, I think people trust Google more as to cloud-based technology than Microsoft.
Amazon is one of Etsy's most relevant competitors. They'd be insane not to consider them a competitor
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.