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

111–120 of 129 posts

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#111

Post by GordonS »

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 guess you've never worked for a large enterprise? The amount of beaurocracy and time wasting is staggering - where I work it takes days at a minimum to get a new VM up, but usually weeks.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#112

Post by btian »

CaptSpify wrote: post #85

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 i…

That's not how any of this works.

Boeing makes a profit, but how much money will it cost to design and make a plane from scratch?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#113

Post by _Codemonkeyism »

I would love to see a cost analysis of a company moving to GCP/AWS.

We were a 6M customer flash sale company sold for $200M. We had 3 devops engineers mostly helping developers with designing the system and pager duty - mainly because 24/7 was to demanding for only 2 people. We were SOX/PCI compliant.

Hosting costs all in all by year were around the same as the salaries I'd say.

People who moved to AWS/GCP, would I save costs in this scenario moving to AWS/GCP?

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#114

Post by code_duck »

BlanketApple wrote: post #79
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…

Agreed, there is a whole lot more to the story that sadly this comment area is too small to contain. Dickerson and Allspaw definitely did a great job of modernizing Etsy from the relatively ragtag team that operated it prior, and it seems pretty robust now.

That’s great – for their engineering department. What about the guiding vision for their core business? It’s not enough to make IT top notch when their overall aim is floundering. As a customer and developer, I frequently felt that their communications and decisions missed the mark and heard this from fellow customers continually. Etsy needs to be run by artists and retailers, not technologists.

Part of the problem is that they want to address the things like eliminating mass produced goods as technology problems, to be eliminated with the right algorithm. I think it risks turning the cozy marketplace into some automated hell like Google or Amazon.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#115

Post by weberc2 »

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've had this experience as well at a Fortune 500.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#116

Post by cobookman »

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.

We should talk. Email me at bookman@google.com, and I'll be sure to get you a competitive pricing estimate.

(Disclamer: I'm a Cloud Solutions Engineer at Google Cloud)

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#117

Post by cobookman »

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…

GCP doesn't have a separate HIPAA cloud. GCP went through the trouble to certify the services themselves for HIPAA. That means you don't need to wait for us to update our `HIPAA` cloud. You are always getting the latest releases.

Here's a full list of our certifications. We're rapidly adding more. Feel free to email me at bookman@google.com if you have any questions: https://cloud.google.com/security/compliance

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#118

Post by cobookman »

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've actually seen some customers span their openstack cluster across on prem & gcp. Giving them the ability to dynamically scale new hypervisor nodes on GCP.

This works great for gaming companies who can see 10x loads during the first few weeks/months of a new video game release.

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#119

Post by cobookman »

alexeldeib wrote: post #106
landryraccoon wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

you can do `bin packing` with k8s as well. Allowing you to have a best of both worlds.

From k8s webpage (https://kubernetes.io/): "Automatically places containers based on their resource requirements and other constraints, while not sacrificing availability. Mix critical and best-effort workloads in order to drive up utilization and save even more resources."

Re: Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

#120

Post by cobookman »

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.

all the cloud vendors can offer holistic commits to give lower than list price. We're talking anywhere from X-XX% discount on a per service level.

Generally you need to have a certain amount of usage before companies will engage these discussions.

Post reply on HN