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Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

investors.etsy.com

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Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#101

Post by wenc »

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…

> no one is waiting for weeks for hardware requisition

I work for a Fortune 500 where we have to wait weeks for hardware. This is not unusual at non-tech companies.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#102

Post by theDoug »

synicalx wrote: post #88
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.

Do you have any facts to back your claims?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#103

Post by seanwilson »

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 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).

What kind of price differences are you thinking about? How much hardware and how many people are employed to take care of this? Does the tripling of cost take salaries into account?

Having to hire a team that will maintain hardware, deal with scalability and give guaranteed uptime isn't cheap and requires a lot of management. I'm not saying it never makes sense, but offloading all that work on to someone like AWS and Google who have teams doing this for you reliably can be well worth the cost.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#104

Post by jimmywanger »

alpha_squared wrote: post #92
gesman wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I know for a fact that AWS that AWS negotiates. My buddy used to work at Netflix and he told me that they got a really good rate for AWS that was not available to the general public.

They might not bid in the strictest sense of the word, but when the vendors are mostly 3 players (Google, Amazon, and Microsoft) you just ask each one for a quote. I don't see how functionally that is different from bidding.

Btw, I know there are other hosting providers out there (Rackspace comes to mind).

I can't think of any one of them that would be able to deal with Netflix scale without shitting the bed, missing features, or an almost unacceptable lead time as they build out infrastructure.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#105

Post by lethargic_meat »

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.

A critical security issue in public cloud is that users often misunderstand what infrastructure security entails.

I've been in public cloud pitches that sold their security measures as a golden standard that made my managers believe there's no need for a security team anymore. No need for protocols or proper architecture as x cloud has enough flashy certifications.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#106

Post by alexeldeib »

landryraccoon wrote: post #94
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…

> 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 deploy…

It's about bin packing. Underutilized servers can have more VMs packed into them. Not physical servers sitting around unused, but additional capacity on in-use machines.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#107

Post by foobarbazetc »

lykr0n wrote: post #43
foobarbazetc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I meant to put it in quotes. :) Hard to find B2C type SaaS companies doing that though (with the exception of Pinboard, who’s crazy :)

We actually haven’t had a hardware failure (apart from HDD that have all been replaced with SSD) in something like 7 years.

We don’t even pay big bucks for Dell, HP etc. Just cheap SuperMicro boxes.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#108

Post by foobarbazetc »

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…

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. If Google told me they’d match my pricing then sure, I’d probably look at doing that too.

Still a lot of issues on GCP for low latency DB deployments though (no permanent NVME, higher latency on the network backed block storage, etc).

Presumably you start looking at Spanner but that’s it’s own world of hurt (higher latency than MySQL/Postgres, a reeaaallyy basic query planner, the list goes on). You have to change the way you think about data with it and pretty much re-architect your data access.

Agreed re machine learning etc.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#109

Post by foobarbazetc »

discoursism wrote: post #98
chx wrote: post #75

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. 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.

It really depends. When we were starting out keeping our hosting costs low with dedicated servers kept us afloat.

We actually make an effort to cut our hosting costs while expanding capacity pretty much every year now because Intel keeps making better chips.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#110

Post by amigoingtodie »

foobarbazetc wrote: post #107
lykr0n wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah I meant to put it in quotes. :) Hard to find B2C type SaaS companies doing that though (with the exception of Pinboard, who’s crazy :) We actually haven’t had a hardware failure (apart from HDD that have all been replaced with SSD) in something like 7 years. We don’t even pay big bucks for Dell, HP etc. Just cheap SuperMicro boxes.

What does your hardware and software stack look like?
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