My Cloud Computing Reflections

Week 4: Etsy's cloud migration

Transcript:

Welcome to my cloud computing reflections. My name is Charles Roberts. This is the fourth week where I listen to a new podcast and go over what new topics I learned, how it challenges my initial thoughts or beliefs, and how it applies to my personal or professional life.

This week, I listened to the cloud cast titled etsy’s big data collection with special guest Kevin Mchale. Kevin is the senior staff engineer at etsy. In this podcast, Kevin discusses the benefits, risks, and lessons learned from migrating to the cloud. According to Mchale, it took approximately a year and a half to migrate the Big Data from in house to Google Cloud.

 Mchale says he was still surprised at how expensive the transition was. The expenses didn’t derive from the cloud services themselves; it derives from the new managements that Mchale’s team underestimated. Cloud migration is more than just copy and pasting files and data to a new storage unit. The business subscribes to an outer source and must abide to the conditions or restrictions. I use git hub, for example, which allows me to retrieve code from any computer I have. However, if I don’t save or upload new changes to the code properly, that could mean a major loss in progress and unnecessary extended work time.

A second lesson learned by McHale is communications between Google’s cloud support, Etsy’s business staff, and his team members. The migration was estimated to take only 6 months, but they spent just as much time optimizing and educating the staff on maintaining the cloud service. The website needs to retrieve this data and run an algorithm that displays the items that aligns with what the clients favors. Etsy is popular for its custom arts and crafts products. According to CNNMoney, this helped Etsy be valued at around 3 billion dollars back in 2015. One day I wanted a custom doll to gift to my friend’s newborn and decided to look up custom doll makers on Etsy. I was given the choice of over 1000 different custom doll designers, but I would only get to see at least 10. All this competition is data that must be stored and retrieved within a database.

To close out this podcast, this cloud cast podcast provides very informative insights on cloud migration for large businesses. Amazon and Etsy are both online resellers, but Amazon have built their own cloud service of AWS while Etsy outsources to Google Cloud. I’m now more certain that other online shopping platform, like Zavvi and Wayfair, are following the same steps as Etsy did if they haven’t already.

That’s all for now, talk to you soon, and thank you. Podcast out.

References

CNNMoney (2015) ‘Etsy now worth over $3 billion. Stock jumps 88% after IPO’, Stockswatch,