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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> Etsy's transition to the Google Cloud Platform is expected to be complete within the next two years.

I have no idea what Etsy looks like internally, but that sounds like an awfully long time in this day and age. Anyone have an inkling as to why this is a multi-year project?

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Having worked for two companies that have shifted to cloud providers, multi-year timescales is fairly usual even just for like-for-like migrations. You can’t just shut down the servers, image them and start them in the cloud, you need to have a plan to progressively migrate services while maintaining site operation.

Truth. This[0] is how we did it for the NYTimes Crossword platform. It took a year and a half, but was managed with a team of only 2 people (myself being one of them).

[0] https://open.nytimes.com/play-by-play-moving-the-nyt-games-p...

I would bet part of this has to do with the support cycle of the hardware they currently have, and other contracts: they have warranty/service/support on their current hardware, and contracts in place for their colocation facility, so they'll keep using those until they're (near) the end.

I'd imagine that the move would require some re-engineering of their services to make the best use of GCP. I'd also imagine that their would be a non-trivial migration process to ensure uptime is maintained and customers are not impacted during the move.

someone set their DNS TTL to ∞

Where are you going with this?

To infinity and beyond, obviously....

He saying that is the reason why it's going to take years; because their DNS names will be pointing to the same IPs forever and not move over to the cloud based servers.

It would of been funnier if you put a finite number, like TTL 3 years.

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