[njyx]

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. It depends on scale and the skills available to you. Yes, amazon and co do a good job of pushing down cloud costs, but you still need people to manage these services.

Also it depends WHEN you build things. Redshift for example is now pretty viable and potentially more cost effective than what Etsy does. 2-3 years ago that very likely wasn't the case.

I'm not saying Etsy doesn't have somewhat higher system costs than others but I doubt it's the cause of their issues.

[jroseattle]

> It depends on scale and the skills available to you.

Skills -- yes. Scale? That's kind of the point, nowadays. You don't need a large staff to accomplish scale.

> I doubt it's the cause of their issues.

Their eng/ops approach wasn't the cause of any business issues, AFAIK. That's why my comment is directed around what happens when business performance suffers -- you start looking for cost reductions.