Etsy completed its migration to the Google Cloud, according to Chief Technology Officer Mike Fisher, and in Wednesday’s announcement, Fisher boasted the move helps the marketplace run more tests, which is something that many sellers find frustrating.
“Etsy’s experiment velocity was up 115% in 2019,” Fisher wrote, stating “this process leads to meaningful insights that help us meet ever-evolving buyer and seller needs, ultimately delivering a more personalized, seamless experience.”
Etsy used to inform sellers about some of its testing, but stopped the practice in January 2019. The page that detailed what it calls “experiments” now redirects to this help page on Etsy.com.
That leaves Etsy sellers playing the, “is it a glitch, a test, or a permanent change” game with which sellers on other marketplaces are all too familiar.
Interestingly eBay rejected a move to migrate to Google Cloud or Amazon AWS, writing in 2018 that it was doubling down on its strategy of hosting its own servers.
In September of that year, eBay’s Mazen Rawashdeh wrote, “As part of an ambitious three-year effort to replatform and modernize our backend infrastructure, eBay is announcing our own custom-designed servers, built by eBay, for eBay.” Rawashdeh was Vice President of Platform Engineering at the time. He is now eBay’s Chief Technology Officer.
Etsy frequently cites that among the biggest advantages of moving to Google Cloud is sustainability. Fisher wrote yesterday, “During the migration, we moved 5.5 petabytes of data from about 2,000 servers to Google Cloud, the equivalent of moving 22 times the data in the Library of Congress. Now, we’re leveraging the cloud’s massive compute power to advance Etsy’s machine learning and product development capabilities, all while delivering on our sustainability goals and mission to Keep Commerce Human.”
You can find the announcement on the Etsy corporate blog.
