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Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

blog.evernote.com

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Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#101

Post by belril »

aluminussoma wrote: post #8
tpetry wrote: 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?

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…

Hi! Author here. (Nice to meet you.) I can tell you that Evernote, not Google, pitched this story to me. While the Google Cloud PR team was aware of its existence, they did not contact or attempt to influence me when it came to its content. (Literally, all that they did was confirm the on-site presence of their engineers, and that an engagement of that sort wasn't a one-off favor to Evernote.)

Unfortunately, a technical deep dive on the exact parameters of the transition wasn't really in scope for this piece. I tried to include detail where I could, and Evernote has a really wonderful 5-part blog series that goes into many of the details of the transition. (It's now linked in this post.)

To provide some additional details on the transfer: Evernote was going from data centers in California that it owned and operated to Google, not from S3. Technically speaking, the migration isn't 100% complete, as Evernote is still finishing the transfer of its attachment files to Google.

Evernote did not disclose the exact details of how that transfer was executed on the record, and thus it did not end up in my piece. Thanks for reading!

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#102

Post by belril »

tpetry wrote: post #13
npunt wrote: 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.

To the best of my knowledge, all of Evernote's data transfer was done over a network, not using an undisclosed AWS Snowball-like service.

-Author of the piece first linked here.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#103

Post by rifung »

nealmueller wrote: post #2

>Right now, the company is still in the process of migrating the last of its users’ attachments to GCP. I wonder if Evernote users can tell if they are on GCP or the previous infrastructure. I suspect not.

According to this article, you'll see some improvements.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/09/evernote-google-cloud-pl...

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#104

Post by belril »

Kiro wrote: post #61

I would pay good money to Evernote if they had a "backup all my data multiple times, removing all possibilities of losing anything". I would gladly pay for Premium if that was an option.

All attachments added to Evernote are now stored redundantly in Google Cloud Storage, which is designed to do just that.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#105

Post by belril »

grx wrote: post #27

Nice Google ad, well done! > Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud Evernote _is_ part of the cloud. Buzzzz > Evernote houses a large amount of unstructured data, and the company is looking to do more with machine learning. Meaning private data? Is this covered in the TOS? Can I influence the usage of my data by Google before migration?

Here's Evernote's explanation of its investigation into user data protection re: GCP. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-2-protecting-...

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#106

Post by Kiro »

therealmarv wrote: post #96
Kiro wrote: post #61

I would pay good money to Evernote if they had a "backup all my data multiple times, removing all possibilities of losing anything". I would gladly pay for Premium if that was an option.

You should look at CloudHQ. Their PDF backups to e.g. Google Drive preserve everything out of Evernote. Used it once to get away from Evernote while still preserving search of old stuff.

Thanks. I don't want to get away from Evernote though.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#107

Post by kbenson »

rrdharan wrote: post #77
chatmasta wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is why you should run your entire application on bare metal (colo or dedicated) with failover to the cloud. The benefit of the cloud is its elasticity. You can handle a 2000% traffic increase by spinning up VMs instantly; no need to wait a day or week or month for bare metal provisioning. And you should do this! But once you've structured your application this way, you are already horizontally scalable. There is…

I've heard this burst-to-cloud story for many years now - Paul Maritz pitched it heavily as the pillar of VMware's value/strategy when he took over there. I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice. I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system, and if you build a new ground-up app this way going full cloud to start is easy and cheap for a while until you're successful a…

> I've yet to ever see or hear of it properly executed in practice.

Isn't Netflix the poster child for this, and haven't they been for a very long time now? Not the content, which resides in their and others CDNs, but the back-end, webservers, databases and management systems are all supposed to be in the cloud now (after a long time migrating).

> I think it's a really hard thing to try and bolt on to a legacy system

There are different levels. Architecting a sharded database solution before you need to might be a bit excessive, but designing for multiple web, storage, or processing servers, etc from the start even if using bare metal is smart, and allows (relatively) easily adding capacity even if you are just colocating somewhere. At the point where you are already able to add capacity by scaling hardware, the cloud is a fairly attractive target, especially since automating the steps you take to add/remove hardware is likely trivial if you've already been doing it manually for a while, as the rough edges have likely been smoothed away somewhat already..

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#108

Post by dastbe »

hartator wrote: post #99
ma2rten wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is using a catering service cheaper for a company than building your own kitchen and hiring a chef? For what it's worth, Google's cafes are run by third party vendors. I am sure they make healthy profits as well.

Google core business is not food whereas Evernote's core one is indeed cloud storage.

Arguably their core business is synchronized notes and well-done applications. The storage, hosting, networking, electricity etc are all implementation details.

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#109

Post by milesward »

StreamBright wrote: post #24
quanticle wrote: post #4

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…

Google does not have any engineers in the countries where are company operates or has contractors. Many people on HN are not from the US or not from locations having this option, so most of our judgment comes from using the online help or having a call with Amazon/Google/MS. Based on my experience, I still think Amazon wins. I bet it was really helpful for Evernote to get such a support though.

Where does your company operate, you might be surprised...

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud

Re: Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

#110

Post by kbenson »

edblarney wrote: post #79
vidarh wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? At list prices? Pretty much never. Nobody sane with installations like Evernote are paying remotely close to the published prices, though. The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many val…

"> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? At list prices? Pretty much never. " ??? It's almost always 'cheaper' for small companies to use the cloud. It costs a lot of money to pay people to figure what hardware to buy, install servers, networking gear, maintain it, pay for bandwidth, backup etc. But the cost becomes 'non starter' when you start to access all the nice things that…

There is some variance in how people interpret "cloud". Does colocating your own machine at a remote ISP constitute being in the "cloud"? What about leasing a server? What about a virtual server, but a traditional one where it's essentially no different than a single leased server? What if your multiple real and/or virtual leased servers are in the same private network at the remote location? What if there's an API available to you (even if it deploys hardware servers)? What if extra services, such as storage, can be attached?

Different people will likely consider "cloud computing" to apply at different thresholds with different features. I also consider "in the cloud" (handled remotely in the internet) to be different than "cloud computing" (handled by a cloud service), and "cloud services" to me could mean either one depending on context. I find most your statements apply truthfully to what I consider "in the cloud", that is, remote hosting. I don't think they necessarily apply when used with "cloud services" platforms. All of a sudden, all the money you save not having to deal with hardware and paying someone to configure and maintain it is either back (you need someone to deal with the craziness of each cloud services platform, and they might cost more), or offset by higher costs, if you don't have a business case that requires you be able to scale later, or add network storage, etc. Better yet, if all you need is a website, there's plenty of services that do away with all that to just provide hosting of various sizing and shapes. Is that a "cloud service"? Is that a cloud service? Probably, but in a conversation about GCE and AWS, maybe it's not actually what's being talked about.

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