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Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

blog.evernote.com

11–20 of 144 posts

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#11
The Stanford HPC team reported last year having sent more than 2PB to Google drive using Lustre/HSM. This was using the public API and the fact that gdrive is free for *.edu sites.

See https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/lad16/07_thiell_cheap_n_de... (slides) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbE0nl5V8WE

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#12
post #6

So a large part of choosing GCE is possibly because CEO was a Googler and he was very familiar with how Google works and his contact at Google helped him scored a better negotiation and possibly even better support. Although I won't deny GCE team would snatch Evernote regardless because it's an important client to show off in GCE's client portfolio. > The decision to go with Google over another provider like AWS or A…

I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Free donuts. That's how you influence and win enterprise accounts.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#13
post #7
post #5

Sadly the article never describes HOW they transfer the data. Simply sending 3PB on the wire will cost a fortune. Maybe Google does have some non-public service like AWS Snowball?

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Yeah, this is actually AWS Snowball. But the Google Cloud does no have a competing offering. It has none publicly, so it would be of real interest if they only have it for big customers handing over their first born son or for everyone on request but not advertising it like AWS.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#15
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing against the author, but it sounds like another story that Google PR pitched and influenced. It is normal these days. I am sure AWS does the same. That is why the technical details may be light. The submitter is likely a Social Media Manager for Google (nothing wrong with that - kudos for not obscuring it!) I, too, have wondered about the technical details when I see stories like this. If the data was original…

The most straightforward is running aws s3 command but as you noted it's single threaded, slow as hell. Imagine you have 100TB of data to migrate from one bucket to another. If the command encounter an error (which is very likely to happen), you have to start again. I think the only other option left is use Spot Fleet EMR. I believe the S3 API takes a marker for pagination so you can probably keep paginate to list th…

I did try EMR + s3distcp a while ago. AWS Support recommended it and provided instructions in their docs. It was not very fast for me. The data I was trying to copy was about 400 GB of small 5-20 kb files - not ideal for fast copying. I gave up and used a different method.

I suspect Evernote, if using S3, would have a similar data profile of many small objects.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#16
I can understand that a company wants to do away with the distraction of having to worry about running a datacentre but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost.

Now it may be that even if more expensive, it is a better use of your capital (renting instead of owning so that you can invest your capital in higher return investments like hiring better people). But is it cheaper, at an equivalent level of service / redundancy?

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#17

Evernote’s engagement with Google engineers was a pleasant surprise to McCormack. The team was available 24/7 to handle Evernote’s concerns remotely, and Google also sent a team of its engineers over to Evernote’s facilities to help with the migration. Those Google employees were around to help troubleshoot any technical challenges Evernote was having with the move. That sort of engineer-to-engineer engagement is som…

Option 3. This is PR and not a postmortem containing facts you can use to inform your decisions.

I fear there is no journalism here. No attempt to uncover real motivations, nothing remotely negative, no dissenting comment from current/past engineers, nothing about who paid what to whom, the incestuous relationships of ex-Googlers (Evernote CEO is ex-Google), how much Google is losing to take on high profile customers, who is placing these stories or anything other than pushing the narrative that "everybody must move to Google Cloud".

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#18
post #5

Sadly the article never describes HOW they transfer the data. Simply sending 3PB on the wire will cost a fortune. Maybe Google does have some non-public service like AWS Snowball?

The Evernote engineering team posted a five part blog post [1] that goes deep on the detail of the migration and work to maintain consistency.

TLDR: Shard at a time was replicated over the network, then live traffic was cut over to the Google Cloud replica.

[1] https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#19
post #13
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Yeah, this is actually AWS Snowball. But the Google Cloud does no have a competing offering. It has none publicly, so it would be of real interest if they only have it for big customers handing over their first born son or for everyone on request but not advertising it like AWS.

They had something like this, but now outsource it to iron mountain: http://itknowledgeexchange.techtarget.com/storage-disaster-r...

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#20

The Stanford HPC team reported last year having sent more than 2PB to Google drive using Lustre/HSM. This was using the public API and the fact that gdrive is free for *.edu sites. See https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/lad16/07_thiell_cheap_n_de... (slides) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbE0nl5V8WE

2PB costs 6 figures for regular GCS a year, I probably wouldn't rely on Google to continue to provide that for free.
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