The note-taking service migrated more than 4 petabytes of data from its own data centers to the public cloud.

Mitch Wagner, Executive Editor, Light Reading

February 8, 2017

5 Min Read
Evernote Gives Itself High Fives, Completes Migration to Google Cloud

Evernote is all "go, us!" on Wednesday, announcing that it's completed its migration from its own infrastructure to Google Cloud in 70 days.

Evernote Corp. announced the migration in September, saying it wants access to Google Cloud features such as machine learning, as well as increased flexibility and reduced cost of managing data centers. (See Evernote Wrapping Up Google Cloud Migration, Looking Ahead to Machine Learning.)

The company named the project "Bob Ross," after the art instructor whose TV program, The Joy of Painting, featured a very mellow Ross painting "happy little clouds."

While many companies have T-shirts commemorating projects, Evernote found socks for the occasion:

Figure 1: Happy Cloud Evernote found Bob Ross socks to commemorate its cloud migration. Evernote found Bob Ross socks to commemorate its cloud migration.

"Because this migration took place in the background, you wouldn't have noticed any changes to your day-to-day experience in Evernote," Evernote Senior Technical Writer SiNing Y. Chan says in a post on the Evernote Blog. My personal experience backs that up -- I'm a heavy Evernote user -- and I haven't seen any complaints about performance.

Chan says:

Rather than pouring resources into the day-to-day maintenance of equipment and software required for running the Evernote service, we can now focus more of our time and energy into responding to customer needs. Though subtle at first, this move to the cloud will bring about more noticeable benefits in the not-so-distant future, such as increased uptime, security improvements, and faster delivery of new and innovative features.

The transition involved moving 5 billion notes and 5 billion attachments, comprising more than 4 petabytes of data.

The migration improves performance (it seems that way to me, particularly on the iPhone app, although I wouldn't swear to it), enhances disaster recovery capabilities, and beefs up security by encrypting data at rest.

Evernote provides technical details: The service is comprised of 762 shards or NoteStores, where the actual notes are stored -- about 300,000 per shard, managing 200 million user accounts, says Ben McCormack, Evernote vice president of operations.

The UserStore is a MySQL-based central user and preferences database that also manages authentication. And the User Attachment Storage manages (you guessed it) attachments.

The service also uses front-end load balancing, and about 200 Linux servers for supporting services such as caching and batch processing.

To move to Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Cloud, Evernote used a combination of "lift and shift" for some services -- namely shards, UserStore and most supporting services -- while other services were transformed for their new environment; these included user attachment storage and load balancing, McCormack says.

When considering the migration timetable, Evernote was caught in a conundrum: The "Big Bang" methodology is a single point where cutting over 100% from the old to new. "This is also known as the 'cross your fingers, close your eyes, press the button and hope everything is OK plan!'" McCormack says.

Phased cutover is "a divide and conquer approach," migrating services in "phases or waves." That's safer and permits more testing, McCormack says.

Big Bang was judged too dangerous. But Evernote's applications are not designed to run split between multiple locations. So the company ended up needing to find a balance between the two approaches, with the migration occurring in less than 20 days, with rollback points if things didn't work as anticipated, McCormack says.

Evernote has a series of detailed blog posts on technology details of the migration, starting here: "Part 1 - The Evernote Service and our options to migrate to Google Cloud Platform (GCP)."

Want to know more about the cloud? Visit Light Reading Enterprise Cloud.

The cloud migration indirectly caused a compound privacy snafu in December. One reason for the migration was to give Evernote and its users access to services based on Google's machine learning. To verify machine learning's accuracy, Evernote said it would allow some of its employees to view some user data. That set off a storm of outrage on social media (when isn't social media outraged about something?).

Evernote posted three separate updates, walking the announcement back, finally reversing itself and saying it would only allow employees to read notes when legally required to do so, such as in cases where Evernote receives a subpoena or court order or needs to prevent or mitigate violations to terms of service -- standard for cloud providers. (See Evernote CEO: 'We Messed Up' on Privacy.)

Evernote finished its migration on Dec. 19. The initial deadline when the company announced the project was early December. That's pretty close, and five months from announcement to completion is fast. So enjoy your Bob Ross socks, guys! (See Why the Evernote Elephant Packed Its Trunk for Google Cloud.)

— Mitch Wagner, Follow me on TwitterVisit my LinkedIn profile, Editor, Light Reading Enterprise Cloud

CALLING ALL CLOUD, NFV AND SDN COMPANIES:
Make sure your company and services are listed free of charge at Virtuapedia, the comprehensive set of searchable databases covering the companies, products, industry organizations and people that are directly involved in defining and shaping the virtualization industry.

About the Author(s)

Mitch Wagner

Executive Editor, Light Reading

San Diego-based Mitch Wagner is many things. As well as being "our guy" on the West Coast (of the US, not Scotland, or anywhere else with indifferent meteorological conditions), he's a husband (to his wife), dissatisfied Democrat, American (so he could be President some day), nonobservant Jew, and science fiction fan. Not necessarily in that order.

He's also one half of a special duo, along with Minnie, who is the co-habitor of the West Coast Bureau and Light Reading's primary chewer of sticks, though she is not the only one on the team who regularly munches on bark.

Wagner, whose previous positions include Editor-in-Chief at Internet Evolution and Executive Editor at InformationWeek, will be responsible for tracking and reporting on developments in Silicon Valley and other US West Coast hotspots of communications technology innovation.

Beats: Software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), IP networking, and colored foods (such as 'green rice').

Subscribe and receive the latest news from the industry.
Join 62,000+ members. Yes it's completely free.

You May Also Like