Etsy successfully moved its website to the cloud, it announced on Wednesday, along with its mobile apps. Etsy said it was done “with minimal disruption to our buyers and sellers.”
Etsy had announced scheduled downtime last month without providing details, and even after the fact, it only told sellers, “During the site maintenance on August 23, we were able to make some important improvements to the systems that power Etsy in preparation for the busy holiday season.” But today, it informed sellers: “On August 19 and 23, Etsy.com and our apps were unavailable for a few hours while we migrated some of our systems (and millions of listings) to Google Cloud Platform.”
Etsy had announced its intentions to migrate to Google Cloud Platform last year. In a post on the corporate blog on Wednesday, Chief Technology Officer Mike Fisher said the company had made “fantastic progress” with the migration to date, though he said there was a significant amount of work yet to do.
“We believe that moving to the cloud is positioning us well for growth by allowing us to focus on strategic initiatives, enhance site performance, and improve engineering efficiency,” Fisher said. “We’ll be able to move faster and push the envelope when it comes to launching new experiments, particularly within search & discovery. All of this will help optimize the buyer experience and drive sales for our sellers.”
He also said the move to the cloud would allow Etsy to make headway on its sustainability goal of reducing its energy consumption and powering Etsy with 100% renewable electricity by 2020.
Meanwhile eBay is headed in the opposite direction, announcing last week it was even going so far as to design and build its own servers as part of an “ambitious three-year effort to replatform and modernize” eBay’s backend infrastructure.
Note: There do appear to be some issues sellers are encountering, see this Ecommerce EKG report and a thread on the Etsy boards that says there are widespread reports of Shop Manager not being available.
So, THAT’S why it loads alot faster.