Etsy confirms completion of two-year migration to Google Cloud
Summary
Peer-to-peer online marketplace Etsy has shifted 2,000 on-premise servers and 5.5PB (petabytes) of data to the Google Cloud Platform as part of a wider, two-year business transformation. Speaking at the 2019 Google Next Conference in San Francisco, Etsy chief architect Keyur Govande said the site had also started to show signs of struggling with the amount of growth it was experiencing at that time. “You rack and stack it, and then you provision it, and [install] all the software you need on it that before it can finally go into production.” He added: “That timeline is really important [to talk about], and Etsy was finding this workflow was not scaling as the site was growing.” Since completing the move to the Google Cloud Platform, Etsy has been able to redistribute 15% of its engineering personnel so they are no longer working on system infrastructure management tasks, and can concentrate instead on work that will enhance the site’s user experience. Incidentally, during the Google Cloud Next session, Govande called out Google’s track record on sustainability as a key factor in its decision to partner with the firm. Etsy’s chief technology officer (CTO), Mike Fisher, said the organisation also needed a cloud provider with the “technical chops” to “move the business forward”, which it is now doing with the help of Google’s machine learning portfolio of tools.