Evernote dumps its own bit barn, boards Google's cloud

Smiles a-plenty down Google way today, after web scrapbook Evernote declared it was tired of running its own bit barns and decided to adopt the G-Cloud.

Evernote says it's just turned eight and “has owned, configured, and maintained its own servers and networks” since day one.

Doing so gave it “the ability to build the service we wanted the way we wanted to build it.”

But the company has now decided its own rig is “expensive to maintain, slow to upgrade, and difficult to scale [and] lacks the speed and flexibility we need for tomorrow.”

The company didn't decide those problems meant it must go cloud, instead asking itself if cloud could do as well as a homebrew rig.

The answer came down on the side of cloud, an evaluation was undertaken and Google came out on top.

Evernote's not saying why it chose Google over other clouds, mentioning deep learning technologies as something it hopes to exploit in “ideas that we think you’ll love.”

Google's canned announcement confirms it, saying “Evernote …. specifically chose Google Cloud Platform for our advanced data analytics and machine learning capabilities.”

Other than that it's the usual “cloud will scale more easily and our developers can therefore do more developing” argument.

Google's cloud is widely considered number three behind Amazon Web Services and Azure, so picking up a top-tier web client is a good look. Especially with Dropbox quitting AWS. But it's also worth noting that machine learning and analytics are best done at scales beyond that most organisations can imagine. Evernote moving to a cloud is therefore unremarkable. That it sees Google as the analytical leader is more interesting, if only because that's the patch IBM is trying to stake out in the cloud.

Landing a big'un like Evernote also suggests Google cloud czar Diane Greene's efforts to build a salesforce and support team capable of working with big business are coming along nicely.

Evernote's promising its migration to Google's cloud will be done and dusted by the end of 2016, will involve two thirty-minute outages at the very worst and will in no way compromise security or privacy. ®