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Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

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Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#91

Post by mathattack »

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.

Lifetime costs for much of this technology is more people costs. Also, much of the benefit comes from what's on top of the hosting. (Not having to worry about old versions of software, containers, better security, no issues if the one person who knows what's going on quits, etc)

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#92

Post by alpha_squared »

gesman wrote: post #76
noahl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As far as I know, which is very little generally, AWS doesn't bid. Prices are as advertised. Not sure if GCP is similar. Azure certainly does, though.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#93

Post by amargherio »

ensignavenger wrote: post #90
ultraluminous wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

I'm glad that I'm not alone in that experience (albeit from the development side). A two week turnaround for a development VM would be amazing; on average, we're closer to a month from request to logging in.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#94

Post by landryraccoon »

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…

> Everyone is using virtualized environments and have capacity to spare.

I don't understand this argument. Startups usually do not have money to have physical servers sitting around just waiting to be utilized, not to mention the IT resources to stand up those servers just in case someone might need them later. You're saying that everyone has a ton of servers sitting in the rack just waiting to have containers deployed to them? Who?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#95

Post by blaisio »

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…

Yeah I definitely agree there are pros and cons on both sides. Every company is different, etc. What I wanted to point out is mainly that it's naive to think the costs of hardware and bandwidth are always most significant or even in the top 5 most significant factors behind whether or not a company should use the cloud. It's a frequent misunderstanding I see posted both on Reddit and hackernews.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#96

Post by ckorhonen »

gesman wrote: post #76
noahl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you are looking to be acquired by someone like Walmart the you might as well build your infrastructure on GCP/Azure now!

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#97

Post by raiyu »

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…

The investor public market bit could be true but it's not about whether cloud is cheaper but how it is treated from a financial reporting perspective.

If you own the hardware or use debt it appears on side of the balance sheet where as if you just pay a provider then it is a cost of business like any other software license so it makes the company look finally better even if the overall actual cash cost is 10-20% more.

Also Etsy has had all Senior Management replaced so new technology leader could just be leading the charge as Etsy was a bit of an anomaly running their own infrastructure because that isn't really a competitive advantage for them from the business customer side.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#98

Post by discoursism »

chx wrote: post #75
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. 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…

> Why on earth would a startup waste money like that?

Because the cost of hosting a typical startup, even on GCP, is trivial compared to a single engineer's salary.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#99

Post by alexasmyths »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #83
alexasmyths wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Yes, but it can take a bunch of paint points away.

If you think about it- why on earth did companies start having massive servers in the first place?

That was an anomoly.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#100

Post by manigandham »

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…

Several of my family members and relatives who work in big corporations have waited months for a new server. It is more common than you think, and often it has nothing to do with physical capacity but rather bureaucracy and compliance overhead.
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