Etsy elevates operations with cloud migration

Etsy plans to improve efficiency and customer experience with cloud-based data storage and analytics.

The handmade and vintage goods e-commerce retailer has completed a two-year migration from physical data centers to a Google Cloud platform. Now fully operational in the cloud, Etsy 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. 

As a result, Etsy has been able to shift more than 15% of its engineering headcount from daily infrastructure management to improving the customer experience. Etsy’s experiment velocity increased 115% in 2019, which the retailer said leads to insights that help its meet buyer and seller needs, ultimately delivering a more personalized, seamless experience. 

This includes building more sophisticated algorithms to help buyers find exactly what they’re searching for within Etsy’s marketplace of more than 65 million seller-generated listings that don’t map back to a single catalog. 

Etsy also says utilizing Google Cloud for data processing will enable it run on 100% renewable electricity by the end of 2020, building on its sustainability efforts that include achieving carbon-neutral shipping. In addition, Etsy says that by allowing it to spin up hundreds of servers in minutes and power then down when they aren’t needed, Google Cloud increases agility while significantly reducing energy usage and overhead resources.

“With the completion of our cloud migration, the sky’s the limit when it comes to our ability to innovate and improve our marketplace, as we leverage the strength and efficiencies we’ve gained through our partnership with Google Cloud,” Mike Fisher, CTO of Etsy, said in a corporate blog post. “We believe our migration to the cloud will allow us to experiment more often with larger data sets and more sophisticated machine learning models, all while reducing our environmental impact. As we gain momentum, we’ll continue to assess how to leverage Google Cloud and take advantage of tools to help make the Etsy experience even better for our community.”