Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 129 posts

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#71

Post by dboreham »

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’m really curious.

I think you can imagine a scenario under which the end goal to have this headline was someone’s primary goal for the past couple of years.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#72

Post by [deleted] »

blaisio wrote: post #57
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.

The hardware and bandwidth costs are only small parts of the full cost of running your own infrastructure. There are so many other benefits: - you don't have to support your own low level services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Spanner, etc. - you don't have to worry as much about things like HIPAA compliance - developers don't have to wait for you to allocate more hardware, greatly slowing down the software developmen…

[deleted]

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#73

Post by 7ewis »

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 work for a company similar to GrubHub outside the US. 'The Cloud' works great for us. Think, how many people order food at 9AM on a Monday? Therefore, we only have a very small amount of servers running. However, 7PM on a Friday... thousands.

Yes, it's still mega expensive. But allows us to scale when we need it and not have to worry about the hardware, cost, or management of it.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#74

Post by ShakataGaNai »

blaisio wrote: post #57
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.

The hardware and bandwidth costs are only small parts of the full cost of running your own infrastructure. There are so many other benefits: - you don't have to support your own low level services like Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Spanner, etc. - you don't have to worry as much about things like HIPAA compliance - developers don't have to wait for you to allocate more hardware, greatly slowing down the software developmen…

So having experienced Ops in both cloud and non cloud companies. A few rebuttals:

- Bandwidth is VERY expensive in AWS compared to what you can buy in Datacenters. A 1 GBPS connection is so "cheap" you can get it and a 42U rack at HE.net for $400/mo ( http://he.net/colocation.html ). That same 1GBPS is roughly 300TB/month. Assuming it's all outbound - that's roughly $21k in AWS.

So bandwidth is a small cost IF you're not moving large amounts of data out of AWS. If you stream media - it can be a HUGE portion of your bill.

- HIPAA Compliance - That and other compliance aspects assumes that you need those compliance frameworks. In enterprise world that might be the case (SOC2 and ISO27k1 are very common requirements for Enterprise SaaS clients). However in the B2C? Users don't care.

- Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare, typically. Developers can use that for their tests. You can also have your datacenter/operations group work with your developers during project planning so the code and HW can be ready at the same time.

That being said, I don't disagree there are advantages to the cloud. I'm AWS certified, I drink the coolaid. But saying that there are "so many other benefits" is ignoring the fact that there are "so many benefits" to on prem too. There are pro's and cons to both sides.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#75

Post by chx »

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.

Why on earth would a startup waste money like that? Just rent a few servers, most places will have it up in a few minutes, guaranteed, any large provider have automated that long ago. Much, much cheaper than the cloud. It seems, even in this thread, that there are two choices: cloud or colo. Hell no to either. Rent dedicated -- yes.

The only reason one would go with the cloud is if you plan to use their services ie not EC2 but the many others. However, those can have a runaway cost too and it's not clear whether a new startup should take on handcuffs like that -- once you decided you are depending on SQS etc it'll be hard to move to elsewhere.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#76

Post by gesman »

noahl wrote: post #53
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.

To answer your question, people get discounts just for negotiating, no PR required. I would guess the conversation went something like this: "___ is how much we pay to host Etsy on bare metal right now. Can you match that?" "Yes." I'm oversimplifying - there are a bunch of other considerations, like guarantees about future prices and capacity availability and whether having more flexibility makes it worthwhile for Et…

I not sure about them asking AWS to bid as they'd see AMZN in a "conflict of interest" online ecommerce space.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#77

Post by [deleted] »

chomp wrote: post #37
olingern wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#78

Post by olingern »

geofft wrote: post #34
olingern wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sp…

> 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

I would disagree here. You can run the metrics for your stack, but it's likely cheaper on AWS. https://awstcocalculator.com/

If you don't need to compute something but twice a day, or just certain times -- you can pay pennies on the dollar for a serverless function. There's no need for an entire server for things like this.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#79

Post by BlanketApple »

code_duck wrote: post #64

Sounds good. I was an early Etsy seller, as a glass artist and bead vendor, As well as a developer who worked with them as closely as I could for a few years. 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…

Disclaimer: I worked at Etsy, a long time ago.

> 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.

I think you're missing quite a bit of this story. I was around during the transition of Chad from CTO -> CEO, and the truth is that Etsy needed to focus on the technology badly during that time. The site would go down constantly. We had very little insight into what was going on with sellers or buyers. Every busy day was basically us crossing our fingers that the site wouldn't go down.

We needed someone focused heavily on the technology. We could never have continued on that path and grown as much as we did.

> Etsy should be focused on one thing: connecting buyers and sellers of handmade art with each other.

Deciding what potential buyers are interested in and what items to display to them is a pretty difficult technology problem.

Detecting mass-produced goods in a way that's more subtle than "ban all Chinese sellers" is a pretty difficult technology problem.

If anything I would argue that Etsy didn't focus nearly enough on that, and focused way too much on "low-hanging fruit" (minor workflow adjustments for sellers and buyers).

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#80

Post by damm »

Okay so how much did they get for free by moving to Google Cloud? That's the question you should be asking.

Etsy has been hurting; why would they move infrastructure now unless t hey got kind of kickback for the PR?

This isn't an easy move; so there has to be a huge benefit to them.

Post reply on HN