Selecting a Cloud Provider

Posted by Mike Fisher on January 4, 2018

Etsy.com and most of our related services have been hosted in self-managed data centers since the first Etsy site was launched in 2005. Earlier this year, we decided to evaluate migrating everything to a cloud hosting solution. The decision to run our own hardware in data centers was the right decision at the time, but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) offerings have changed dramatically in the intervening years. It was time to reevaluate our decisions. We recently announced that we have selected Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as our cloud provider and are incredibly excited about this decision. This marks a shift for Etsy from infrastructure self-reliance to a best-in-class service provider. This shift allows us to spend less time maintaining our own infrastructure and more time on strategic features and services that make the Etsy marketplace great.

Although we use the term ‘vendor’ when referring to a cloud provider, we viewed this as much more than a simple vendor selection process. We are entering into a partnership and a long-term relationship. The provider that we have chosen is going to be a major part of our successful initial migration, as well as a partner in the long-term scalability and availability of our site and services. This was not a decision that we wanted to enter into without careful consideration and deliberate analysis. This article will walk you through the process by which we vetted and ultimately selected a partner. We are not going to cover why we chose to migrate to a cloud hosting provider nor are we going to cover the business goals that we have established to measure the success of this project.

From One, Many

While the migration to a cloud hosting provider can be thought of as a single project, it really is one very large project made up of many smaller projects. In order to properly evaluate each cloud provider accurately, we needed to identify all of the sub-projects, determine the specific requirements of each sub-project, and then use these requirements to evaluate the various providers. Also, to scope the entire project, we needed to determine the sequence, effort, dependencies, priority, and timing of each sub-project.

We started by identifying eight major projects, including the production render path for the site, the site’s search services, the production support systems such as logging, and the Tier 1 business systems like Jira. We then divided these projects further into their component projects—MySQL and Memcached as part of the production render path, for example. By the end of this exercise, we had identified over 30 sub-projects. To determine the requirements for each of these sub-projects, we needed to gather expertise from around the organization. No one person or project team could accurately, or in a timely enough manner, gather all of these requirements. For example, we not only needed to know the latency tolerance of our MySQL databases but also our data warehousing requirement for an API to create and delete data. To help gather all of these requirements, we used a RACI model to identify subproject ownership.

RACI

The RACI model is used to identify the responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed people for each sub-project. We used the following definitions:

Responsible – This is the person ultimately responsible for completing the project or initiative.

Accountable – This is the person to whom the R is accountable, and who must approve the work before it is okay to complete.

Consulted – These people might have data that is useful in completing the project.

Informed – These are people that should be kept informed or notified about the progress of the project but who do not need to approve of any step or artifact.

Each Responsible person owned the gathering of requirements and the mapping of dependencies for their sub-project. The accountable person ensured the responsible person had the time, resources, and information they needed to complete the project and ultimately signed off that it was done.

Architectural Review

Etsy has long used an architectural review process, whereby any significant change in our environment, whether a technology, architecture, or design, undergoes a peer review. As these require a significant contribution of time from senior engineers, the preparation for these is not taken lightly. Experts across the organization collaborated to solicit diverse viewpoints and frequently produced 30+ page documents for architectural review.

We determined that properly evaluating various cloud providers required an understanding of the desired end state of various parts of our system. For example, our current provisioning is done in our colocation centers using a custom toolset as automation to build bare-metal servers and virtual machines (VMs). We also use Chef roles and recipes applied on top of provisioned bare-metal servers and VMs. We identified a few key goals for choosing a tool for infrastructure creation in the cloud including: greater flexibility, accountability, security, and centralized access control. Our provisioning team evaluated several tools against these goals, discussed them, and then proposed new workflows in an architecture review. The team concluded by proposing we use Terraform in combination with Packer to build the base OS images.

Ultimately, we held 25 architectural reviews for major components of our system and environments. We also held eight additional workshops for certain components we felt required more in-depth review. In particular, we reviewed the backend systems involved in generating pages of etsy.com (a.k.a. the production render path) with a greater focus on latency constraints and failure modes. These architectural reviews and workshops resulted in a set of requirements that we could use to evaluate the different cloud providers.

How it Fits Together

Once we had a firm-ish set of requirements for the major components of the system, we began outlining the order of migration. In order to do this we needed to determine how the components were all interrelated. This required us to graph dependencies, which involved teams of engineers huddled around whiteboards discussing how systems and subsystems interact.

The dependency graphing exercises helped us identify and document all of the supporting parts of each major component, such as the scheduling and monitoring tools, caching pools, and streaming services. These sessions ultimately resulting in high-level estimates of project effort and timing, mapped in Gantt-style project plans.

Experimentation

Earlier in the year, we ran some of our Hadoop jobs on one of the cloud providers’ services, which gave us a very good understanding of the effort required to migrate and the challenges that we would face in doing so at scale. For this initial experiment, however, we did not use GCP, so we didn’t have the same level of understanding of the cloud provider we ultimately chose.

We therefore undertook an experiment to enable batch jobs to run on GCP utilizing Dataproc and Dataflow. We learned a number of lessons from this exercise including that some of the GCP services were still in alpha release and not suitable for the workloads and SLAs that we required. This was the first of many similar decisions we’ll need to make: use a cloud service or build our own tool. In this case, we opted to implement Airflow on GCP VMs. To help us make these decisions we evaluated the priority of various criteria, such as vendor support of the service, vendor independence, and impact of this decision on other teams.

There is no right answer to these questions. We believe that these questions and criteria need to be identified for each team to consider them and make the best decision possible. We are also not averse to revisiting these decisions in the future when we have more information or alpha and beta projects roll out into general availability (GA).

Meetings

Over the course of five months, we met with the Google team multiple times. Each of these meetings had clearly defined goals, ranging from short general introductions of team members to full day deep dives on various topics such as using container services in the cloud. In addition to providing key information, these meetings also reinforced a shared engineering culture between Etsy and Google.

We also met with reference customers to discuss what they learned migrating to the cloud and what to look out for on our journey. The time spent with these companies was unbelievably worthwhile and demonstrated the amazing open culture that is pervasive among technology companies in NY.

We also met with key stakeholders within Etsy to keep them informed of our progress and to invite their input on key directional decisions such as how to balance the mitigation of financial risk with the time-discounted value of cost commitments. Doing so provided decision makers with a shared familiarity and comfort with the process and eliminated the possibility of surprise at the final decision point.

The Decision

By this point we had thousands of data points from stakeholders, vendors, and engineering teams. We leveraged a tool called a decision matrix that is used to evaluate multiple-criteria decision problems. This tool helped organize and prioritize this data into something that could be used to impartially evaluate each vendor’s offering and proposal. Our decision matrix contained over 200 factors prioritized by 1,400 weights and evaluated more than 400 scores.

This process began with identifying the overarching functional requirements. We identified relationship, cost, ease of use, value-added services, security, locations, and connectivity as the seven top-level functional requirement areas. We then listed every one of the 200+ customer requirements (customers referring to engineering teams and stakeholders) and weighted them by how well each supported the overall functional requirements. We used a 0, 1, 3, 9 scale to indicate the level of support. For example, the customer requirement of “autoscaling support” was weighted as a 9 for cost (as it would help reduce cost by dynamically scaling our compute clusters up and down), a 9 for ease of use (as it would keep us from having to manually spin up and down VMs), a 3 for value-added services (as it is an additional service offered beyond just basic compute and storage but it isn’t terribly sophisticated), and a 0 for supporting other functional requirements. Multiple engineering teams performed an in-depth evaluation and weighting of these factors. Clear priorities began to emerge as a result of the nonlinear weighting scale, which forces overly conservative scorers to make tough decisions on what really matters.

We then used these weighted requirements to rank each vendor’s offering. We again used a 0, 1, 3, 9 scale for how well each cloud vendor met the requirement. Continuing with our “autoscaling support” example, we scored each cloud vendor a 9 for meeting this requirement completely in that all the vendors we evaluated provided support for autoscaling compute resources as native functionality. The total scores for each vendor reached over 50,000 points with GCP exceeding the others by more than 10%.

As is likely obvious from the context, it should be noted that Etsy’s decision matrix (filled with Etsy’s requirements, ranked with Etsy’s weights by Etsy’s engineers) is applicable only to Etsy. We are not endorsing this decision as right for you or your organization, but rather we are attempting to provide you with insight into how we approach decisions such as these that are strategic and important to us.

Just the beginning

Now, the fun and work begin. This process took us the better part of five months with a full-time technical project manager, dozens of engineers and engineering managers, as well as several lawyers, finance personnel, and sourcing experts working on this part or in some cases full time. Needless to say, this was not an insignificant effort but really just the beginning of a multi-year project to migrate to GCP. We have an aggressive timeline to achieve our migration in about two years. We will do this while continuing to focus on innovative product features and minimizing risk during the transition period. We look forward to the opportunities that moving to GCP provides us and are particularly excited about this transformational change allowing us to focus more on core, strategic services for the Etsy marketplace by partnering with a best-in-class service provider.