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Comment by geofft | Hacker News Reader

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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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.

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.

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.

What does your hardware and software stack look like?

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

There is nothing "extreme" about any of that.

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.

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

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