Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud

Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by geofft on Thursday December 14, 2017 @03:11PM (#15926481)

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 Capital letter, in the NYTimes story from a couple weeks ago, etc.) I heard some rumors about this when I was applying for a job right before the layoffs happened, and I didn't hear anyone expressing interest in moving out of their datacenters before the layoffs.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by foobarbazetc on Thursday December 14, 2017 @03:28PM (#15926644)

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.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by lykr0n on Thursday December 14, 2017 @03:50PM (#15926900)

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.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by foobarbazetc on Friday December 15, 2017 @01:25AM (#15930004)

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.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by amigoingtodie on Friday December 15, 2017 @01:51AM (#15930101)

What does your hardware and software stack look like?

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by bogomipz on Thursday December 14, 2017 @05:47PM (#15927991)

>" I think they were racking their own stuff and even running their own routers etc."

There is nothing "extreme" about any of that.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by raiyu on Thursday December 14, 2017 @11:05PM (#15929600)

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.

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Re:Etsy Announces Move to Google Cloud by itronitron on Thursday December 14, 2017 @09:20PM (#15929233)

it almost sounds like the move to Google Cloud is being driven by someone's career goals

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