Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-service-options-migrate-google-cloud-platform-gcp/

by ShanaM • 9 years ago

204 137 9 years ago

blog.evernote.com

nealmueller• 9 years ago

Right now, the company is still in the process of migrating the last of its users’ attachments to GCP.

I wonder if Evernote users can tell if they are on GCP or the previous infrastructure. I suspect not.

disiplus2• 9 years ago

evernote user. cannot tell.

theDoug• 9 years ago

You'd likely see performance improvements but not much else.

rifung• 9 years ago

According to this article, you'll see some improvements.

https://www.engadget.com/2017/02/09/evernote-google-cloud-pl...

quanticle• 9 years ago

    Evernote’s engagement with Google engineers was a pleasant surprise to 
    McCormack. The team was available 24/7 to handle Evernote’s concerns 
    remotely, and Google also sent a team of its engineers over to Evernote’s 
    facilities to help with the migration.

    Those Google employees were around to help troubleshoot any technical 
    challenges Evernote was having with the move. That sort of 
    engineer-to-engineer engagement is something Google says is a big part of 
    its approach to service.

It's interesting to read that, given that one of the perennial complaints about GCE on Hacker News is the relative lack of support compared to AWS or Azure. Is it just that when you're a customer that big, even Google is willing to give you personalized service? Or is this a sign of a change in the GCE support model?

eicnix5• 9 years ago

I think having purchased the highest support configuration and being a big customer will always improve your support situation.

duncanawoods• 9 years ago

Option 3. This is PR and not a postmortem containing facts you can use to inform your decisions.

I fear there is no journalism here. No attempt to uncover real motivations, nothing remotely negative, no dissenting comment from current/past engineers, nothing about who paid what to whom, the incestuous relationships of ex-Googlers (Evernote CEO is ex-Google), how much Google is losing to take on high profile customers, who is placing these stories or anything other than pushing the narrative that "everybody must move to Google Cloud".

TillE• 9 years ago

And it's not merely a positive piece; those quoted paragraphs literally read like marketing copy.

fhoffa• 9 years ago

Find Evernote's technical take on their series of blog posts:

- https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

StreamBright4• 9 years ago

Google does not have any engineers in the countries where are company operates or has contractors. Many people on HN are not from the US or not from locations having this option, so most of our judgment comes from using the online help or having a call with Amazon/Google/MS. Based on my experience, I still think Amazon wins. I bet it was really helpful for Evernote to get such a support though.

milesward• 9 years ago

Where does your company operate, you might be surprised...

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud

yokisan• 9 years ago

I run a service on Firebase (now part of Google Cloud Platform) and ran into problems recently. To my surprise, the support was excellent. And I've only a few thousand users.

As for whether that level of support was acquired with the rest of Firebase or is native to GCE, I don't know.

diek• 9 years ago

I probably helps that the current CTO of Evernote used to work for a higher-up VP in Google Cloud for years when they were with Yahoo and GoDaddy.

user59944613• 9 years ago

Or is this a sign of a change in the GCE support model?

It's standard practice for all professional services (not limited to tech or cloud). When you are a major client you always get privileges and custom support.

It's a mix of you pay so much for the service that they can give you some help + it's good for PR and case studies + it helps them to gather feedback on their services.

That's just the way business do business (outside of the 20 years old children at SV companies who are scared to talk to sales guys and support).

tpetry2• 9 years ago

Sadly the article never describes HOW they transfer the data. Simply sending 3PB on the wire will cost a fortune. Maybe Google does have some non-public service like AWS Snowball?

npunt• 9 years ago

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

tpetry2• 9 years ago

Yeah, this is actually AWS Snowball. But the Google Cloud does no have a competing offering. It has none publicly, so it would be of real interest if they only have it for big customers handing over their first born son or for everyone on request but not advertising it like AWS.

aluminussoma4• 9 years ago

Nothing against the author, but it sounds like another story that Google PR pitched and influenced. It is normal these days. I am sure AWS does the same. That is why the technical details may be light. The submitter is likely a Social Media Manager for Google (nothing wrong with that - kudos for not obscuring it!)

I, too, have wondered about the technical details when I see stories like this. If the data was originally stored in S3, they probably used the Cloud Storage Transfer Service (https://cloud.google.com/storage/transfer/). The secret sauce appears to be parallelization of the transfers.

When I copied hundreds of GB of data from one bucket of to another AWS bucket, it took me days to do! Then I realized it was because I was running a single threaded process. The slowest part was getting the list of objects to copy. If I had a separate, faster index of the objects, then I could have done a copy in parallel much more quickly and max out the bandwidth available to me. (Maybe that is part of the rationale of Netflix's S3mper?).

I'm curious to hear other thoughts on accomplishing fast transfers of S3 data.

Edit: theoretically speaking, if you had 1 TB of data to transfer, and a paltry 100 Mbps (12.5 MB/s) connection, you could do this in under 24 hours if the entire network was fully utilized. Not a network engineer so go easy on me if I am wrong!

As for costs, sending 1 TB out will cost $90,000 in S3 transfer costs, before any other discounts.

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

The most straightforward is running aws s3 command but as you noted it's single threaded, slow as hell. Imagine you have 100TB of data to migrate from one bucket to another. If the command encounter an error (which is very likely to happen), you have to start again.

I think the only other option left is use Spot Fleet EMR. I believe the S3 API takes a marker for pagination so you can probably keep paginate to list the next N keys (of course assume your current bucket is no longer accepting new objects... otherwise create a Lambda function and let new file to be copied to the new bucket on create event).

I don't remember if aws s3 cp --recursive bucket1 bucket2 requires local copies first, or it is a remote copy-only operation.

I have always wanted AWS to allow S3 bucket to be transferred from one account to another with simply transferring ownership.

belril5• 9 years ago

Hi! Author here. (Nice to meet you.) I can tell you that Evernote, not Google, pitched this story to me. While the Google Cloud PR team was aware of its existence, they did not contact or attempt to influence me when it came to its content. (Literally, all that they did was confirm the on-site presence of their engineers, and that an engagement of that sort wasn't a one-off favor to Evernote.)

Unfortunately, a technical deep dive on the exact parameters of the transition wasn't really in scope for this piece. I tried to include detail where I could, and Evernote has a really wonderful 5-part blog series that goes into many of the details of the transition. (It's now linked in this post.)

To provide some additional details on the transfer: Evernote was going from data centers in California that it owned and operated to Google, not from S3. Technically speaking, the migration isn't 100% complete, as Evernote is still finishing the transfer of its attachment files to Google.

Evernote did not disclose the exact details of how that transfer was executed on the record, and thus it did not end up in my piece. Thanks for reading!

ranman• 9 years ago

As for costs, sending 1 TB out will cost $90,000 in S3 transfer costs, before any other discounts.

1TB out would be closer to $0.09 * 1024 == $92.16 (still expensive) -- think you may have misplaced a decimal there.

douglasfshearer• 9 years ago

The Evernote engineering team posted a five part blog post [1] that goes deep on the detail of the migration and work to maintain consistency.

TLDR: Shard at a time was replicated over the network, then live traffic was cut over to the Google Cloud replica.

[1] https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

esseti• 9 years ago

the timing of these blog post is actually just perfect.. probably they knew that the "geeeks", after reading the PR article, wanted to have more insights.

Jabbles• 9 years ago

You may have seen this story a few days ago, where a summer intern project at Google saved 1.5PB per day:

https://students.googleblog.com/2017/02/intern-impact-brotli...

Since this would be a simple connection from Evernote's existing location to Google, I don't think the cost would be a significant factor.

boulos2• 9 years ago

3PB over a fast, peered connection isn't unreasonable (and again, this would all be ingress to GCS which we don't charge for, but your provider would). The limiting factor would be how much you want to attack your storage layer at home.

Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud (but wasn't involved in this migration, nor even particularly aware).

user59944613• 9 years ago

Nope.

First, getting data into the cloud is cheap, it's outbound bandwidth that's expensive.

Second, that's peanuts for a big company. Most wouldn't notice a 100k bills for a one of transfer. Not to mention it's negligible compared to the size of storage and processing.

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

So a large part of choosing GCE is possibly because CEO was a Googler and he was very familiar with how Google works and his contact at Google helped him scored a better negotiation and possibly even better support. Although I won't deny GCE team would snatch Evernote regardless because it's an important client to show off in GCE's client portfolio.

The decision to go with Google over another provider like AWS or Azure was driven by the technology team at Evernote, according to Greg Chiemingo, the company’s senior director of communications. He said in an email that CEO Chris O’Neill, who was at Google for roughly a decade before joining Evernote, came in to help with negotiations after the decision was made.

origami7772• 9 years ago

I'm sure that had nothing to do with it. Free donuts. That's how you influence and win enterprise accounts.

brianwawok• 9 years ago

Doughnuts are for contracts < 100k. For > 1 million it's steak and maybe box seats at a basketball game.

yeukhon5• 9 years ago

Evernote didn't get everything for free. They still pay Google with some NDA stuff in the contract (better support, better pricing model, some free stuff here and there). I wouldn't have a second doubt the CEO's past employment at Google influenced the decision. After all, he had to sign it.

unix-junkie• 9 years ago

The Stanford HPC team reported last year having sent more than 2PB to Google drive using Lustre/HSM. This was using the public API and the fact that gdrive is free for *.edu sites.

See https://www.eofs.eu/_media/events/lad16/07_thiell_cheap_n_de... (slides) and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbE0nl5V8WE

khc• 9 years ago

2PB costs 6 figures for regular GCS a year, I probably wouldn't rely on Google to continue to provide that for free.

superdaniel• 9 years ago

Wow. I wonder how many eyebrows at google that has raised

djmobley• 9 years ago

Guess Evernote are prepping for a sale/IPO?

Moving into the cloud at this stage doesn't make any sense otherwise.

StreamBright4• 9 years ago

Why would it not make any sense? They probably did an analysis on this and decided that GCP overall is a better solution to their problem.

I regularly move companies to the cloud because they cannot afford to setup their on services and just want to focus on the business side of tech and write software only that delivers business value. These companies tend to use queue services, CDNs, scalable file stores, clustered database servers, disposable environments for research. If they had to operate these services, it would be a horrendous cost and huge amount of effort to set this all up and keep it running. Cloud vendors to these things for a reasonable price and it is ready to be used today. I find it very hard to think of any scenario where cloud does not win the game, this is why Google and Microsoft is betting on it.

disiplus2• 9 years ago

i run my own "cloud" on rented bare metal, i have to be mad according to people like you.

vidarh11• 9 years ago

I regularly move people off cloud providers once they realise how expensive they are.

We usually cut peoples fully loaded costs in two or more by moving them to dedicated hosting. Far more if they're bandwidth intensive (Google and AWS charge in the region of 5x to 50x as much for bandwidth as most other hosting alternatives)

There is certainly segments that use a lot of disposable environments and complex services where it makes sense to go to cloud providers, but I've yet to see a client where it came out as the cheapr option.

If they're big enough to negotiate steep discounts, then that certainly changes - I know one company that has 75% discounts over the public prices from one of the major cloud providers, and they're not that large (yearly spend in the high six digits).

inthewoods• 9 years ago

You also have to take into account the number of people it takes to run the data center operations in looking at the total costs. If they had 20 people required to operate running their own servers, that's probably around $2m/year in personnel costs, whereas they might be able to reduce that to, say, 5 people and save $1.5m just on that.

cm21872• 9 years ago

I can understand that a company wants to do away with the distraction of having to worry about running a datacentre but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own? Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost.

Now it may be that even if more expensive, it is a better use of your capital (renting instead of owning so that you can invest your capital in higher return investments like hiring better people). But is it cheaper, at an equivalent level of service / redundancy?

rubber_duck• 9 years ago

Amazon and Microsoft seem to be making healthy profits off their cloud services. That's part of your cost.

Only if you can do it more efficiently than them. If they are more efficient then they can make a profit and you still save money.

throwaway13337• 9 years ago

Only if they are so efficient that after they get their cut, it's still more efficient than rolling your own.

Because these cloud services have inherent lock-in, they don't have enough incentive to keep margins low. Indeed, Amazon's margins are extremely high after factoring in bandwidth costs.

fuzzybeard2• 9 years ago

Reminds me of the "buying locally grown food" argument that's premised on the assumption that buying locally grown food requires less carbon emissions because the food doesn't have to be transported from far away. HOWEVER that argument ignores that even after factoring in transportation, those larger industrial farms are farm more efficient than your local farm. So even with transportation the industrially sourced food might be more carbon efficient.

eicnix5• 9 years ago

First of all it is important to understand that building/running your own cloud isn't only huge investment and high risk but also comes high cost of opportunity because every cent you spend in infrastructure you hope will be cheaper is not spend to increase the real value of your product. Not making this investment until your organisation and IT are "cloud-ready" decreases this risk. I have seen companies invest more than double the cost of a cloud provider to build their own cloud without having access to the features that a public cloud provider provides.

For me the questions come down to the proportion of resources to revenue and how "cloud-ready" you are.

yourapostasy• 9 years ago

Hm, but how much of those features they don't have access to would actually be used? After a few decades in the trenches, I've come to (mostly, kind of) accept that on average, most companies do not push the leading edge, and settle for relatively baseline feature sets of all of the software they use. As long as a deployment hits those feature points, they don't aggressively push for learning, testing, deploying and using new features.

This is of interest to me because no matter how I slice it, when analyzed from this "baseline feature" perspective, cloud solutions of conventional software that require deploying upon conventional platforms are expensive, and I figure I must be missing the picture. I'm much more excited about cloud solutions like AWS Lambda that de novo solutions are built around, as those do seem to have more promise delivering the much-talked-about 2-10X cost improvements compared to conventional software, but still at a high cost of vendor lock-in due to lack of cloud API standards adoption by vendors.

vidarh11• 9 years ago

Building/running your "own" cloud doesn't require owning bare metal servers. You can rent and lease for a fraction of the price of renting cloud instances. Once you start paying up front of reserved instances, the capital invested tends to start stacking against you.

You certainly can burn through ridiculous amount of money if you insist on purchasing servers outright and pick expensiv brands.

Conversely, the "private cloud" deployment I run are mostly rented servers with month-to-month contracts. No upfront infrastructure spend - we grow them a server at a time. We also run some bare metal setups and they're generally cost-competitive with rented servers, but there it certainly depends on the size of the installation.

threeseed• 9 years ago

If all you are using Amazon/Microsoft for is EC2 style hosting then yes it's expensive.

But if you are interested in Big Data Analytics as well (as Evernote would be) then it is a bargain. It is very expensive to run your own managed Hadoop cluster, build the data ingestion and scheduling components, event store, NoSQL store, machine/deep learning pipelines not to mention AI technologies and have them all integrated and cohesively packaged.

acqq4• 9 years ago

if you are interested in Big Data Analytics as well (as Evernote would be)

They seem to call it "machine learning" "to help you get the most out of your Evernote experience."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/evernotes-new-privacy-poli...

As one author once wrote "Whenever a company says 'In order to serve you better', you can be pretty sure they're about to do something that will make your life more miserable." I like the point of xkcd 1150 too. But Evernote actually does take money from their note taking customers.

ChuckMcM• 9 years ago

   >  is using one of the major cloud services cheaper 
   > than running your own?

Depends on the size and to some extent the distribution. Above a certain size (and this varies based on the mix of memory, storage, and CPU cycles) it is cheaper to run your own stuff in a space leased from a data center. However that size generally has to be achieved at every data center you want to run in. For example, if your function was that it saves money above size 10, And you need 7 units in the US and 7 units in Europe, it is probably not cost effective to run your own even though your up to 14 units of capacity, but if you're running 15(US) and 12(EU).

That said, you still have to have the the operational expertise to run it and with that expertise will come an understanding of the actual costs. For example, at Blekko we were running 1500 machines in a data center and had just over 12,000 hard drives. Those drives are going to fail over time so you need build process around continually renewing the drives. You assume that you'll be able to get some replaced under warranty but you should also simply depreciate the cost of drives over 3 years. So you spend $110 on a drive, you depreciate it at cents per day. That is an "expense" you incur as you buy replacement drives. So your storage is "costing" you $36,000/month ($0.10 * 12,000 drives * 30 days). At the time it was the 2TB generation and our system used simple triple replication for data protection so it represented 8PB of data protected storage, of which, at any given time we were utilizing roughly 5PB. S3 from Amazon [1] is .021/GB per month so 5 petabytes (just what we were using) would be $105,000 per month (so roughly triple the cost). And there is the network 'in/out' costs which raise the prices further and you don't pay for your own storage. Most of our storage management costs (detecting bad drives, reformatting, scheduling for RMA) was done automatically but it did take an data center engineer one day each weak to work through the list of drives that had been determined to be bad, swap in replacements from the 'incoming' drive box, and put the outgoing into the 'rma' box (40 drives in the box) and once the outgoing box was full, print out the list of serial numbers and generate a standardized RMA to Western Digital and to then put the shipping label on the box. So in addition to the depreciation cost you add 20% of the cost of a date center engineer who is doing the mechanical work of moving dead drives out.

So you can cost it out this way for your own infrastructure and figure out which is cheaper, and for a lot of people it will be cheaper to run it in the cloud because you really don't need multiple petabytes of data or thousands of cores on line or terabytes of RAM. And some people build their systems in efficiently so that they are spending way more on people keeping them running than they might if they had designed them differently. glindahl had honed a set of scripts and tweaked Nagios bits that made running lots of machines fairly efficient but not everyone has someone like that on staff.

But the place where it is a real win, and I think this was the economic story that got Evernote to move, is that when you downsize your infrastructure needs it is trivial when you are in the cloud, and it is non-trivial when they are your own assets. Data center leases are generally multi-year and they are loath to let you sublet space or reduce space.

Since Evernote has been shrinking this makes a lot of sense for them, when their user base shrinks their costs shrink with it. And that is the "killer app" for cloud based infrastructure.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/s3/pricing/

kuschku• 9 years ago

Even then, you can usually save a lot by renting dedicated machines, and running your own kubernetes cluster on top of them.

That option seems to have been entirely forgotten recently.

vidarh11• 9 years ago

but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own?

At list prices? Pretty much never. Nobody sane with installations like Evernote are paying remotely close to the published prices, though.

The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many valid reasons for smaller companies to consider cloud deployments, but I've yet to see one where it was the cheaper alternative.

koolba3• 9 years ago

The cloud providers rarely make sense in terms of cost for smaller businesses unless you heavily rely on batch jobs (spinning servers up/down) or other of their more advanced services. There are many valid reasons for smaller companies to consider cloud deployments, but I've yet to see one where it was the cheaper alternative.

The cost of a server isn't just the hourly/monthly fee for running it. It's also the cost of waking up at 3am to turn it back on. If you're managing your own bare metal then you have to deal with that one yourself and I can assure you it's never cheaper than the cloud unless you value your time at $0.

Sure you can save some money by running a server yourself but if your business it as the point where that's the deciding factor in being solvent than you might as well close shop.

edblarney• 9 years ago

"> but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own?

At list prices? Pretty much never. "

???

It's almost always 'cheaper' for small companies to use the cloud.

It costs a lot of money to pay people to figure what hardware to buy, install servers, networking gear, maintain it, pay for bandwidth, backup etc.

But the cost becomes 'non starter' when you start to access all the nice things that cloud offers: Lambdas, S3, easy backups, etc. etc. and the fact that it 'scales on demand'.

Then of course there are the financing aspects: you don't pay for expensive servers up front, you 'lease' them effectively - which has serious working capital benefits.

All those things have considerable business value.

So sure - if you want to compare only 'server instance costs' - maybe 'buying your own instance' - specifically on a server by server basis ... maybe it's cheaper to buy a server.

But for most small businesses - the advantage of the cloud far outweighs the cost.

I'd argue that 'rolling your own infrastructure' would be risky and costly initiative that boils down to a 'cost optimization' only, and can't really be considered until a business reaches an operational degree of maturity and visibility wherein someone could really sit down and plan quite far into the future.

And even then I'm not so sure - this is why so many big and successful companies still use the cloud.

zhte415• 9 years ago

Perhaps phrase the question differently, to challenge the premise it is 'cheaper':

"Could they set up a datacentre as an independent subsidiary that they were client to, but that was run on a commercial basis for other customers too?" i.e. commercially viable.

If the answer is "Yes" as it was for Amazon years ago, then it seems like a no-brainer - do it yourself. Otherwise, such decisions calls for greater scrutiny. For example, should HR services be run internally, or outsourced. Outsourcing some functions don't work even they're more expensive on first analysis, like the network effects internal HR can have, or the answer may be "No" for some services, Payroll a common example.

jaypaulynice2• 9 years ago

You know Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Google, etc and other major companies use CDN's like Akamai to deliver their content to users right?

Building a few data centers may not be not be hard and may be cheaper, what's hard is serving content fast and as close to your users as possible in the world. For that how many data centers could you really build?!

aiiane• 9 years ago

Google runs its own CDN.

macroblocks• 9 years ago

but is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own?

Discovery Communications recently announced moving all infrastructure for linear broadcast playout to AWS to replace their data centres.

AWS re:Invent 2016: Discovery Channel's Broadcast Workflows and Channel Origination on AWS (MAE303)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6iao7Zcq1-s

25:30 - Rationale, background 53:00 - Discussion of financial models, move from capex to opex

Keep in mind that the volume of data in terms of video assets for broadcast quality linear playout as well as numerous continuous high bitrate outgoing video streams is very large.

As they note in the video, their financial modelling showed that it made financial sense to move to AWS if it was "all-in", allowing them to fully close down a number of large data centres.

mbesto• 9 years ago

That's part of your cost.

Except, I get to share one person across several systems.

Simplified example:

$100k/year for a Linux engineer

That same person can upgrade 10 Linux servers (on-premise company) or 1000 linux servers (cloud provider). It may take the 1000 linux servers slightly longer, but the cost to service is still significantly lower.

There's also a lot less variability in skills of the Linux engineer.

I don't think people quite understand that cloud computing is a consolidation and elimination of backend computing jobs, not the increase. The only reason there is an increase in the market, is because the overall pie is growing.

ma2rten• 9 years ago

Is using a catering service cheaper for a company than building your own kitchen and hiring a chef?

For what it's worth, Google's cafes are run by third party vendors. I am sure they make healthy profits as well.

hartator• 9 years ago

Google core business is not food whereas Evernote's core one is indeed cloud storage.

maverick_iceman• 9 years ago

I think economy of scale will kick in at some point allowing the cloud providers to profit while being a cheaper service than what the clients could have done themselves.

bluGill• 9 years ago

It is cheaper for my company. We have very high seasonal demand on one of our websites. Our busy months need 10 times as many servers as the low months. With amazon we pay for the servers only when we use them. When we did it ourselves the servers spent most of the year idle, but using electricity and maintenance but earning us nothing just so we could handle out peak demand. Now we pay nothing for them when we are not using them.

December is one of our low months: those servers we were hitting hard in September are now helping some online store keep up with the Christmas rush. I believe this is factored into the price we pay.

We do a lot of our own work in house. In general we have enough IT staff that it is more cost effective to keep our own servers in house, but that is for loads where the variation is relatively small.

user59944613• 9 years ago

is using one of the major cloud services cheaper than running your own?

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer: HELL YES!

People commonly underestimate what it would take to have their own AWS/Google by multiple orders of magnitude.

CaptSpify2• 9 years ago

But is it cheaper, at an equivalent level of service / redundancy?

I see people saying yes to this all the time, but I've never seen it come true. I'd love to see some hard stats, but I've never seen them.

StreamBright4• 9 years ago

Running a datacenter is still a hard problem to solve. Evernote just realised that.

cel1ne• 9 years ago

Infrastructure is always messy:

http://www.dourish.com/publications/2007/BellDourish-Yesterd...

gtsteve• 9 years ago

I'm sure they've known that for a while but the company is about as old as the big public cloud providers and at that time I was certainly nervous about using them.

If they started today I imagine they wouldn't have dreamed of having their own datacenters.

patrickg_zill• 9 years ago

Running a datacenter is a solved problem. Period.

What I get from this is that they want to use Google's available horsepower in machine learning and maybe, trying to build their own TensorFlow equivalent would have cost them extra and have added risk of becoming rapidly out of date, since Google is investing heavily in it.

grx• 9 years ago

Nice Google ad, well done!

Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud

Evernote _is_ part of the cloud. Buzzzz

Evernote houses a large amount of unstructured data, and the company is looking to do more with machine learning.

Meaning private data? Is this covered in the TOS? Can I influence the usage of my data by Google before migration?

acqq4• 9 years ago

Meaning private data? Is this covered in the TOS?

Your question is right on the mark. The last attempted privacy policy change, less than two months ago, did cause some reactions:

"The latest update to the Privacy Policy allows some Evernote employees to exercise oversight of machine learning technologies applied to account content"

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/evernotes-new-privacy-poli...

"The policy changes have to do with machine learning, which Evernote says it is using to “help you get the most out of your Evernote experience.” Evernote wants to let its machine learning algorithms crunch your data, but it doesn’t want to stop there — the company also wants to let some of its employees read your notes so it can ensure that the machine learning is functioning properly."

Also:

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/16/evernote-u-turn/

belril5• 9 years ago

Here's Evernote's explanation of its investigation into user data protection re: GCP. https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-2-protecting-...

CaptSpify2• 9 years ago

Has evernote ever claimed that your private data is inaccessible to them? Legitimate question as I've never used their product.

veritas213• 9 years ago

rSync FTW?

neotek2• 9 years ago

That was a surprisingly frustrating article to read. It kept repeating the exact same things just worded slightly differently over and over again, like the four or five times it mentions machine learning being a major part of Evernote's decision to go with Google, without ever explaining what, exactly, that machine learning would be.

The whole thing reads like a press release targeted at an audience that doesn't know anything about the actual mechanics of cloud computing.

Edit: Fortunately Evernote have published a great five-part series on their blog[1] which goes into much greater detail about the transition to GCS, although there's still no explanation of how machine learning fits into their future plans.

[1] https://blog.evernote.com/tech/2017/02/08/part-1-evernote-se...

kristianc• 9 years ago

That's more or less because it is - it's aimed at enterprise IT 'decision makers' with predominantly on prem stacks, and is a glorified marketing case study.

dang• 9 years ago

Thanks. We changed the URL to that from http://www.pcworld.com/article/3167594/data-center-cloud/her....

neotek2• 9 years ago

Thanks mate, I wish other online communities were moderated this well!

abc03• 9 years ago

Evernote wanted to take advantage of the cloud to help with features based on machine learning that it has been developing

I noticed there are other companies citing machine learning as a reason to move to one of the big three (Xero.com gave the same reason when moving to AWS). Could someone give more Background Information to this and what are the exact Advantages?

diamondo25• 9 years ago

Think of provide better suggestions, analyzing comments for quality and reach and other things you can figure out when you have loads of data.

acqq4• 9 years ago

According to this article, they intended to analyze the notes taken by their users and also have their "employees read your notes so" they "can ensure that the machine learning is functioning properly" and that to "help you get the most out of your Evernote experience."

https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/evernotes-new-privacy-poli...

I believe that they simply wanted to enable the targeted ads or sell the newly generated data, and that they still want to do this. But maybe somebody here has more insight.

some1else3• 9 years ago

Please excuse the loose relation to this specific aspect of their relationship, but there's something bothering me about Google & Evernote.

I recently set up a consumer grade LG Android smartphone. A few days later I got a push notification inviting me to install Evernote[1]. I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google? How does one unsubscribe from such app adverts? By disabling Google Play Store notifications? I really didn't know push ads for apps are a thing. Besides the annoyance, it seems like an unfair advantage over all the other top apps.

[1] https://cl.ly/2U0K2H3S071E

alwan• 9 years ago

This is by LG

johansch• 9 years ago

I wonder who gets paid for that: the telco, LG, or Google?

Almost certainly the OEM (LG) or the telco. I have seen a lot of bundle/notification/ad deals from both types of entities, but never from Google.

efraim• 9 years ago

Tap and hold the notification and Android will show you what app it belongs to. You can also view the most recent notifications in Android settings.

some1else3• 9 years ago

Thanks!! I was hoping someone might drop a tip like that, so I kept the notification around. Indeed.. After a long press, it reveals that it's owned by the Evernote[1] app. Apparently it comes preinstalled. The gear button results in a crash, but I was able to block notifications under the info icon. Probably best to take the time and purge all the bundled apps, before another one pops up.

[1] https://d17oy1vhnax1f7.cloudfront.net/items/1Q1L2Y2f3R3v0m1n...

nolok• 9 years ago

It's LG. HTC used to (maybe still) do the same.

criddell• 9 years ago

I have the Kindle app on my phone and it sends a notification just about every day. I didn't mind because often their recommendations were interesting to me and I would occasionally buy the book they were pushing.

Then they started pushing magazines. I wish there was some way to tell Amazon that I'm not going to subscribe to a magazine. I ended up turning off notifications.

some1else3• 9 years ago

I just realized I can make another ~700 polite off-topic questions, before my karma runs out. That's actually very acceptable :-D. First time I see it as currency.

Kiro3• 9 years ago

I would pay good money to Evernote if they had a "backup all my data multiple times, removing all possibilities of losing anything". I would gladly pay for Premium if that was an option.

therealmarv3• 9 years ago

You should look at CloudHQ. Their PDF backups to e.g. Google Drive preserve everything out of Evernote. Used it once to get away from Evernote while still preserving search of old stuff.

Kiro3• 9 years ago

Thanks. I don't want to get away from Evernote though.

belril5• 9 years ago

All attachments added to Evernote are now stored redundantly in Google Cloud Storage, which is designed to do just that.

20years3• 9 years ago

Next up -> Google acquires Evernote.

therealmarv3• 9 years ago

Nah. It's not a good simple nice solution. Google also hates Desktop Apps (except their browser). And IMHO Google Keep makes a much better job for short notes without wasting whitespace.

Evernote’s transition to Google Cloud Platform

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