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I think this article addresses what they do; they work their way down the stack and broaden what they provide to the business vs outsourcing to some SaaS compan

by Eridrus 12y ago

I think this article addresses what they do; they work their way down the stack and broaden what they provide to the business vs outsourcing to some SaaS company. Sure, you could run this in the cloud and not worry about physical machines, but that will probably be more expensive. As companies grow, it becomes cheaper to bring lots of things in house, rather than outsourcing them. As companies grow, small % differences can result in large total impact, at which point having engineers eek out small gains may make a lot of sense, e.g. think of Google's results around latency, or small improvements in recommendation engines that drive higher sales.

jroseattle 12y ago
> you could run this in the cloud and not worry about physical machines, but that will probably be more expensive. I question what the current cost structure looks like. As a public company, my guess is that investors will do the same as well. In a world where Instagram deals with orders of magnitude more customers with a whopping five engineers, it's a pretty high bar to show why so many resources are necessary for this particular operation. I'm sure the Etsy guys are sensitive to that as well, but from the outside it's hard to believe there isn't a better way to use resources more efficiently.
- mcosta 12y ago
  I instagram loses a photo, nobody cares. If etsy loses an order is deal-breaker. Not the same problem domain. edit: Instagam has not that many customers. Has many users. That's a real diference.
  - jroseattle 12y ago
    Very good point. A transaction involving a user's money carries a great deal more weight in terms of reliability, accuracy, etc. That said, the resource difference between these two companies is considerably large, and the tech in question (e-commerce) is not exactly an area of unknown innovation. From a technical standpoint, that's sufficiently a solved problem.
jerguismi 12y ago
It is very difficult to imagine what kind of scaling needs are, if running in the cloud is more expensive than having 200+ engineers. Even salary of one engineer buys quite a gigantic amount of hosting.

by Eridrus 12y ago

jroseattle 12y ago

> you could run this in the cloud and not worry about physical machines, but that will probably be more expensive. I question what the current cost structure looks like. As a public company, my guess is that investors will do the same as well. In a world where Instagram deals with orders of magnitude more customers with a whopping five engineers, it's a pretty high bar to show why so many resources are necessary for this particular operation. I'm sure the Etsy guys are sensitive to that as well, but from the outside it's hard to believe there isn't a better way to use resources more efficiently.

mcosta 12y ago
I instagram loses a photo, nobody cares. If etsy loses an order is deal-breaker. Not the same problem domain. edit: Instagam has not that many customers. Has many users. That's a real diference.
- jroseattle 12y ago
  Very good point. A transaction involving a user's money carries a great deal more weight in terms of reliability, accuracy, etc. That said, the resource difference between these two companies is considerably large, and the tech in question (e-commerce) is not exactly an area of unknown innovation. From a technical standpoint, that's sufficiently a solved problem.

jerguismi 12y ago

It is very difficult to imagine what kind of scaling needs are, if running in the cloud is more expensive than having 200+ engineers. Even salary of one engineer buys quite a gigantic amount of hosting.