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Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

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Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#81

Post by chaostheory »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #74
blaisio wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare

Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#82

Post by toomuchtodo »

chaostheory wrote: post #81
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.

You can use virtualization on prem; it’s trivial. No one is still racking hardware on demand. Don’t want to use Xen or KVM? Kubernetes is your solution if you’re a containers shop.

On prem delivery/provisioning is not slower when executed properly.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#83

Post by toomuchtodo »

alexasmyths wrote: post #68
toomuchtodo wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

"and if you're megacorp scale you can afford ops and bare metal you can depreciate over several years." 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 scr…

Most big orgs are dysfunctional. Moving to the cloud doesn’t fix company culture.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#84

Post by ultraluminous »

chaostheory wrote: post #81
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.

First of all, as the sibling comment mentioned, no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition. Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare. Spinning up a new instance in VMware is not harder (in fact easier) than in AWS and hardware costs are SO much cheaper than Amazon's margins.

Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's exactly the original AWS value prop, run a hybrid private/cloud environment and extend to the cloud when needed.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#85

Post by CaptSpify »

Another DC to cloud story! I love these!

It's like watching a play in 3 acts:

Act 1) Yay, we did it, we're gonna save so much money!

Act 2) [a year later] Wait, we're spending how much money?!?

Act 3) It's going to cost us how much to leave our current cloud?!?

Haven't people figured out yet that cloud companies make a profit? Sure, companies like Etsy can get a huge discount, but everyone else who isn't a big name is going to pay out the ass.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#86

Post by apendleton »

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.

Two big savings opportunities:

* elastic demand, either in the sense that your global traffic has peaks and troughs, or your global traffic is steady but its global distribution changes such that the balance of where you're deployed would ideally change over time; in either case you can benefit enormously from automatic scaling

* workloads that can take advantage of the spot market (or whatever GCP's equivalent is)

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#87

Post by itronitron »

geofft wrote: post #19
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 C…

it almost sounds like the move to Google Cloud is being driven by someone's career goals

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#88

Post by synicalx »

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.

Google's marketing engine just remembered earlier this year that they have a cloud product that they kind of forgot to push for the last 3-4 years and decided to cut the DevOps poster child a better deal in exchange for a high-profile migration to the exclusion of the other cloud providers.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#89

Post by [deleted] »

olingern wrote: post #78
geofft wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#90

Post by ensignavenger »

ultraluminous wrote: post #84
chaostheory wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waiting for hardware allocation. Once you get to a certain size you have hardware spare Requisitions for non-cloud server resources can takes hours, days, and in some places weeks; even when there is availability depending on the org. At best it takes close to an hour compared to a few seconds in the cloud via a web dashboard.

First of all, as the sibling comment mentioned, no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition. Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare. Spinning up a new instance in VMware is not harder (in fact easier) than in AWS and hardware costs are SO much cheaper than Amazon's margins. Furthermore, If you have spiking workloads or hyper growth and can't do proper capacity planning - that's…

I beg to differ, I am a systems engineer for a Fortune 500 retailer, and my team has been waiting weeks, and have been told it will be some time next year, for some vmware instances we need.

That being said, not every organization is as dysfunctional.

I think the best approach would be a hybrid one, where developers could spin up instances in the "cloud", and ops would migrate them into the main infrastructure when it made sense to do so.

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