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Evernote is moving all its data, machine learning to Google Cloud
- jbverschoor 10y agoExport all to enex. Import into Notes.app. Done.
- copperx 10y agoI hope that they finally remove their 100,000 note limit with their new infrastructure.
- matt_wulfeck 10y ago> As a result, Evernote will be shutting down its previous storage architecture that was based around a private cloud infrastructure, along with some of its own tech. Good riddance! Deploying Openstack Swift was a nightmare in my personal experience. A few outages and I decided I'll never work a job supporting it again. If a recruiter mentions "Openstack" to me what I hear is a shamble mess of a services with components you'll be on-call for which will break in unique ways. Oh and of course you're expected to maintain the entire infrastructure while you do your normal job. Just move to the cloud already.
- dmourati 10y agoWere they running OpenStack?
- pbarnes_1 10y agoNo.
- CaptSpify 10y agoYeah, because putting your money-maker in someone else's hands is always a great idea /s It's better to look at each situation, and decide whether the cloud is a good idea or not. Let's stop pretending this is the only good solution.
- nzp 10y agoCPUs, networking, and storage are not Evernote's money makers. And I'm fairly sure Google's machine learning is a lot better than what Evenote can do. Anyway, infrastructure in cases like these is really like a public utility. No one says companies are putting their money maker in other's hands because they use public grid electricity (or sewage, or water supply, etc.).
- CaptSpify 10y ago> CPUs, networking, and storage are not Evernote's money makers. Evernote's money-maker is the sum of those parts. > No one says companies are putting their money maker in other's hands because they use public grid electricity (or sewage, or water supply, etc.). Yeah, because that's generally not the product. Those are typically by-products. They happen after the product is produced.
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoYou are always partially in someone else's hands unless you happen to own a private, dedicated connection to your client.
- karma_vaccum123 10y agoAgreed. OpenStack is a total dumpster fire, yet still companies like RedHat push it. I narrowly avoided a long term (career-derailing) OpenStack assignment...four days in...oh, this is all based on OpenStack?...transfer approved
- harlowja 10y agoSo out of curiosity, what did you see about OpenStack that made you go this route? I myself am a PTL (project technical lead) in one of the OpenStack projects and although I do understand where you are coming from I wonder what the gist of the experience you had was... Care to share what experiences you have that made you think 'total dumpster fire'? I know the software isn't perfect, but then what software is? Also I've seen that the OpenStack 'having a bad time experience' is as much of a cultural change as it is a software change; ie, OSS in general isn't a take and not contribute kind of thing, that's not how it really works/gets better.
- djsumdog 10y agoI worked for a company that did openstack; was pulled into their security team. That company dumped so much money just to have a terrible openstack client offering. There was no CVE mailing list like other projects. We had to scrape their launchpad bug tracker. On top of that none of the package repos we checked (Canonical's, Debian's .. couple of others) would even have package updates for up to three weeks on some of the CVEs. We started building out own CI so we could build and patch ourselves. Then I got pulled from the open stack team onto something that was not a bottomless pit of haemorrhaging money.
- rconti 10y agoGood to know. For a year or two now, I've felt guilty that I haven't taken the time to learn OpenStack, and felt I was missing out on a career-enriching experience.
- sengork 10y agoThe deployment part of OpenStack is why some companies have ceased having multiple solution offerings for their customers. Instead they now offer a single uniform OpenStack distribution that they know can be supported more so than 2+ other distribution and deployment variants of it. There are a lot of on-premise workloads which cannot be moved to someone else's remote cloud (for varying reasons). This is where OpenStack fills in the gap and provides something better than an ad-hoc brew-it-yourself cloud platform. That being said it still requires a good understanding of the requirements as well as a well chosen distribution to match the foreseen use-cases.
- godzillabrennus 10y agoIt's why I tell companies who want open stack to use NephoScale http://www.nephoscale.com http://www.nephoscale.com so it's not solely on their shoulders to fix things.
- mrmondo 10y agoYeah I tried Openstack swift and while there are some great parts to it, dear god that thing was riddled with piles of python and bash scripts holding everything together hahaha, look maybe I'm wrong I certainly didn't spend long looking through it but I did find it a little 'scary' to say the least.
- caraboga 10y agoOpenstack swift isn't great, but if you move the proxy/account/container services away from the actual object store, as the read/write requirements are different, and if you opt to run your object store on proper hardware, it will scale well pretty well. I'm curious as to what really made you hate it. From my vantage point of running openstack in production from Essex to Juno, Openstack Swift after Folsom release was the most reliable part of openstack outside of keystone and glance. (Nevermind that it was also the easiest to upgrade as well). Or you can use the ceph stuff, which is also pretty nice.
- fulafel 10y agoHas Evernote gotten over their reliability problems? At one point there seemed to be an exodus over eating people's data. Eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009995 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7009995
- mike_ivanov 10y agoIn case if anybody is looking for a replacement - https://turtlapp.com/ https://turtlapp.com/. Bonus: it's written in Common Lisp (https://github.com/turtl/api https://github.com/turtl/api)
- cddotdotslash 10y agoThere is a very strong chance that this PR was "strongly encouraged" by Google in exchange for huge credits on the actual service. They've been hunting for larger customers they can use to advertise like they did with Spotify.
- vgt 10y agoWhile I've heard this narrative discussed before, I'd like to offer some thoughts: - Companies do not (or should not) make cloud purchasing decisions be based entirely on some kind of preferential pricing. Cloud is far from a commodity, especially in ML/Big Data space. In both Evernote and Spotify cases, they highlight strategic technological advantages of Google Cloud. In fact, customers tend to be fairly specific in outlining their findings[0], cost rarely being the main factor. - I urge you to share evidence that Spotify received "huge credits" in exchange for PR. - It's not unusual for companies to make such announcements. It's very much standard practice for AWS customers. It's good PR for both parties, imho. - There are many other "big" names disclosed in 2016. And it's no secret that what Snapchat has achieved on Google's PaaS is nothing short of extraordinary. [0] https://medium.com/@thetinot/i-think-google-cloud-is-the-best-best-tech-best-pricing-best-support-best-roadmap-and-best-4b4e17856505 https://medium.com/@thetinot/i-think-google-cloud-is-the-bes... (disc: Work on Google Cloud and put together [0] )
- pbarnes_1 10y agoI don't doubt you, but how would the average HNer have any evidence of what goes on between companies behind closed doors? :) I am surprised to see Evernote moving to GCP to be honest. The cost increase in using GCP vs self-hosted hardly ever make sense for storage providers (which is kind of what Evernote boils down to). And it's not like Evernote is doing well financially. It's why Dropbox went the opposite direction.
- vgt 10y agoI agree, of course. However, insinuating that such an announcement, and choice of cloud partnership, is dictated heavily by preferential pricing diminishes both customer's decision making and provider's intrinsic abilities. It's the not so subtle cloud "ad hominem" these days. On your second point, per [0], Evernote is interested in Google's ML capabilities. [0] fortune.com/2016/09/13/evernote-google-cloud/
- kstrauser 10y agoI've migrated completely to DEVONthink (Mac/iOS only, though). Sync databases are encrypted and they live on my own WebDAV server, so I can keep as many notes as I can squeeze into a dozen TB or so of available storage. I don't begrudge Evernote their business model, but I'm much more comfortable with upfront software licensing than subscriptions. That's especially true when it means I no longer have to trust anyone else's terms of service when it comes to keeping my private stuff private.
- mstaoru 10y agoI thought they had a good business in China? Apparently it will stop working here once they move to G-you-know-what.
- akhaku 10y agoThe China service is a completely separate service from the main one. Different servers entirely (same-ish code though), housed within servers inside the great firewall. AFAIK that stuff is staying in the data center in China. (Evernote employee here)
- ComodoHacker 10y agoAll your data are belong to Google. Eventually.
- esseti 10y agoIs there any technical post about what to move where? Would like to know the technology and how they exploit GC to support such a service.
- laocoon 10y agoI used to use Evernote all the time, although I wouldn't consider myself a power user. I don't think I utilized all of the features very well. I came to it through Tim Ferriss, I believe, and it was really amazing for me at the time. I hardly ever use it anymore, using mostly notebooks for actual note taking now. I used to use the web clipper to save articles, but I found that when I would put something in Evernote, I hardly ever went back to access it later. It was like putting things in a vault. That probably all speaks more to me than the product. I am curious what new features they can provide with access to all of Google's machine learning APIs.
- nkw 10y agoI'm there with you. I used to use it all the time and even paid for Evernote business for the office (I think only 7 or 8 other in the office use it), however I've been using it less and less lately and will probably drop it at renewal time. It seems like I'm always stepping over useless features (Work Chat? uh, no) while hoping they actually implement features their users are asking for (e.g. dark mode - https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/94974-dark-mode-for-mac-client/ https://discussion.evernote.com/topic/94974-dark-mode-for-ma...). I probably just need to bite the bullet and figure out how to export everything I have in it to OneNote or something.
- PhasmaFelis 10y agoOneNote is vastly better, IMHO. (With the major caveat that it's not available for Linux, which will be a dealbreaker for many. Works on OSX/iOS/Android, though.) I really don't understand what happened to Evernote. It was very good and getting better all the time; then a few years back they decided to pivot to...something else, I'm still not sure what...and essentially abandoned all the features I used to start pushing lots of features I never would.
- shostack 10y agoIt looks like it is free now. Given Evernote's horrendous move to limit the number of devices a user can access their notes with (literally the dumbest gating mechanism I've ever heard of in this day and age where device-agnosticism is table stakes), I'm looking for a free alternative. Are there any downsides moving from a free Evernote account to a free OneNote account in your opinion?
- perseusprime11 10y agoNot sure how long they will be around but I am not sure if this is a high yield project at this time. Instead they should be focusing on fixing defects and bringing important features to users.
- gumby 10y agoPerhaps upgrading their back end is part of doing those things?
- pmyjavec 10y agoWhat exactly does a company like Evernote have to do with machine learning ? Do they have a targeted advertising platform? I can see how it might be good for things like image recognition but what else are they doing with it? I am Genuinely curious, I've not used Evernote for several years, it just got out of hand and bloated I found. Machine learning is really starting to feel just like another trigger phrase.
- jhayward 10y agoEvernote's main feature when first announced was very good handwriting recognition. You could just snap a picture of a board or note pad and have searchable text in the cloud. There's some kind of cluster of OCR expertise in the Russian computer science community given ABBYY Finereader as best-in-class printed OCR and Evernote as best handwriting OCR.
- Omnipresent 10y agoTesseract (used correctly with some pre-processing) can compete with ABBY
- ghshephard 10y agoMachine Learning? I'd just like to be able to do a boolean search of my notes inside the client. Something like: {Search for (notes tagged household or notes tagged personal) and (tagged 2016)} Or even something like: not notebook:"Personal Finance" I love evernote, but it often feels like the team writing the search engine quit before the job was quite done.
- mschnell 10y agoTry -notebook:...
- ghshephard 10y agoNope, no such luck. You can search for things that are in a notebook with the query: notebook:receipt but not -notebook:receipt
- overcast 10y agoIt's the new buzzword of the year, now that VR is flopping.
- sabertoothed 10y agoYou're so wrong on so many levels.
- overcast 10y agoElaborate then please, level by level.
- sabertoothed 10y agoLevel 1: 'Buzzword' has the connotation that it sounds impressive to outsiders but is not much else than hot air. Sometimes there is even a connotation that it is an imprecise, non-technical term. Level 2: Machine Learning, however, has been well-defined in the past (starting in the 50s), is now widely used, contains a whole set of (old but also) new innovative techniques and actually contributes massive value to many domains. Level 3: VR is far from dead. EDIT: a word EDIT_2: I would have agreed if you had said 'trend'. Yes, it is a trend.
- overcast 10y agoThank you.
- sabertoothed 10y agoYou're welcome. Thanks for being polite.
- sctb 10y agoWe detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490758 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12490758 and marked it off-topic.
- gavinpc 10y ago"Its" data? There's no mention in TFA of the data belonging in any way to the users. And maybe that's accurate. Yes, we have web/cloud apps now. But that is—or should be—orthogonal to where data is stored and hosted. Of course app vendors have every incentive to create lock-in. And most users are just happy to hear that "you do not need to take any action" and your data will just be magically faster and more secure. But at least around here, wouldn't people rather own their storage? Does remoteStorage have any legs?[0] This kind of happened with authentication, right? It's common now to use OAuth to provide login using a third party. Of course, they're mostly silos, too, but at least in principle an app could let you choose a provider. [0] https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-remotestorage-07 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-dejong-remotestorage-07
- api 10y agoI wish people cared. After many years in this industry I've personally come to the conclusion that nobody actually cares about security, privacy, or data ownership. People say they do but they are lying, as evidenced by the fact that they do not change their behavior. People gripe about security and privacy but continue to use "free" surveillanceware/spyware and continue to migrate everything to cloud hosts they don't control. The only thing people care about in reality is convenience and user experience, and they're obviously willing to give up an almost unlimited amount of personal privacy and control to get those things.
- sxg 10y agoIt sounds like that might be a reaction to the lack of obvious repercussions of giving up privacy and security. What tangible harm does the average person come to by giving up privacy, security, and data ownership?
- CaptSpify 10y agoI think it's more about immediate impact. Will I be hurt today if I put my data on someone else's cloud? probably not. Will I 10 years from now? possibly, but by then, my brain will have disassociated those two.
- binaryanomaly 10y agoNot really that good news from a customer point of view. And there goes my data, my privacy, ... That said I really liked evernote. Decent alternatives, cross-platform, mobile app, good usability, ...?
- amaks 10y agoAFAIK Google Cloud uses encryption throughout including for storing data with customer-provided keys. Not sure how your privacy would suffer in this case.
- vgt 10y agoTrue. And there's a paper for that: https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at-rest/ https://cloud.google.com/security/encryption-at-rest/ (work at GCP)
- ams6110 10y agoAny data you put into "the cloud" is not private (unless you encrypted it ahead of time)
- ishansharma 10y agoI tried a lot to find a good alternative and the best one I could fine was Microsoft OneNote. However, I didn't like the apps and went back to Evernote. They have been improving lately though.
- binaryanomaly 10y agoI also think evernote is top from a usability point of view. On the other hand I'm more and more disappointed from their pricing politics and general company values.
- Oletros 10y ago> And there goes my data, my privacy, ... Are companies that host on EC2 or Azure giving the customer data or giving up on privacy?
- Balgair 10y agoA rose by any other name smells just like Google Wave's Zombie?
- ja27 10y agoStep 1: Replace the CEO with a Googler. Step 2: Migrate to Google platform. Step 3: Exit via Google acquisition.
- Analemma_ 10y agoEvernote employees, if you're curious what happens to you in this scenario, people who worked at Nokia should be able to clarify.
- binaryanomaly 10y agoI'm afraid you're not that wrong here :(
- bsharitt 10y agoStep 4: Existing application shut down by Google.
- rch 10y agoThe team could transition to Keep, maybe.
- throwawaymsft 10y agoStep 5: Blog post about the wonderful journey users are about to embark on.
- the_man_man 10y agoStep 6: Mention a 2 week shutdown notice and do not provide support to to download data in a sensible way or migrate to a different service.
- msh 10y agoEvernote actually got nice export tools build into their desktop client.