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>If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go w

>If you're a startup who wants to minimize capex and quickly spin up a reliable, secure infra to host your app on to get it out of the door ASAP, you would go with cloud. But that's exactly what Etsy isn't. They've been around for years. It's a stable, mature business (at least by the standards of the sort of business they're in). What possible advantage could they gain from switching to this cloud?

smacktoward 9y ago
Some executive will get to lead a big cloud migration project, which will look great on their résumé when they bounce to their next job a few years later. Oh, you meant advantages for the company? Never mind.
- pm90 9y ago
  I chuckled at this comment, but this is actually a very astute observation. I've seen it happen way too many times (and destroy many companies and people's lives) to laugh about it :(.
- NTDF9 9y ago
  It's called RDD. Resume driven development
adventured 9y ago
Access to dozens of services that AWS offers, that you'd want to utilize entirely on their networks ideally. That service list is only going to keep expanding. The cost for Etsy to duplicate and maintain any of those, is high. AWS is also likely to be one of the leading platforms for AI services/tools, which Etsy will no doubt want to make heavy use of in the future; that's another expensive duplication effort if they do it all in-house. Let's say AWS has 50 services today. Etsy won't have to duplicate any of those by building & maintaining their own versions. It's an extraordinarily time consuming and expensive process to do so. The capabilities AWS can enable will get greater, while the expense to replicate on your own what AWS can do, will also climb. The extrapolated result, is that AWS & the others will perpetually take market share for the next 10+ years from do it yourself approaches. More for the software duplication expense (time & money), than the hardware/bandwidth cost difference.
- TulliusCicero 9y ago
  Uhh, it literally says "Google Cloud" right there in the headline. Not AWS.

smacktoward 9y ago

Some executive will get to lead a big cloud migration project, which will look great on their résumé when they bounce to their next job a few years later. Oh, you meant advantages for the company? Never mind.

pm90 9y ago
I chuckled at this comment, but this is actually a very astute observation. I've seen it happen way too many times (and destroy many companies and people's lives) to laugh about it :(.
NTDF9 9y ago
It's called RDD. Resume driven development

adventured 9y ago

Access to dozens of services that AWS offers, that you'd want to utilize entirely on their networks ideally. That service list is only going to keep expanding. The cost for Etsy to duplicate and maintain any of those, is high. AWS is also likely to be one of the leading platforms for AI services/tools, which Etsy will no doubt want to make heavy use of in the future; that's another expensive duplication effort if they do it all in-house. Let's say AWS has 50 services today. Etsy won't have to duplicate any of those by building & maintaining their own versions. It's an extraordinarily time consuming and expensive process to do so. The capabilities AWS can enable will get greater, while the expense to replicate on your own what AWS can do, will also climb. The extrapolated result, is that AWS & the others will perpetually take market share for the next 10+ years from do it yourself approaches. More for the software duplication expense (time & money), than the hardware/bandwidth cost difference.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
Uhh, it literally says "Google Cloud" right there in the headline. Not AWS.