Helping Etsy Migrate Its Data Warehouse From On-Premises to Google Cloud Platform With No Downtime
Etsy is an American e-commerce company building a global marketplace for unique and creative goods. It is home to a universe of special, extraordinary items, from unique handcrafted pieces to vintage treasures. They help their community of sellers turn their ideas into successful businesses.
Etsy partnered with Wizeline to build core product design and development talent across their business. Through this partnership, Wizeline has helped Etsy enhance its technology and overall business.
In this case study, we explore how Wizeline helped Etsy modernize its data warehouse from on-premises Vertica to Google Cloud (GC), reducing TCO by >30% while improving Engineering productivity.”
The Challenge: Modernizing an On-Premise Data Analytics Warehouse to the Cloud
Etsy’s on-premise data analytics warehouse was reaching end-of-life within the year. Etsy’s on-prem Vertica warehouse had ballooned to ~450 TB, feeding 10 K+ tables and 1 K+ data sources spread across dozens of product teams. This led to rising maintenance costs and rigid infrastructure, limited speed, innovation, and the ability to handle fast-growing data volumes (now exceeding 1 PB). Therefore, they needed to re-platform to a cloud-native, self-service analytics stack that could scale effortlessly while letting engineers focus on new insights—not hardware upkeep This project needed to be accomplished all while keeping Etsy’s data security and culture as a top priority.
The architecture was highly interconnected, and for this migration, Etsy needed to refactor ten internal systems as well as build and modernize 3k pipelines, 2k views, and 1k SQL scripts, making this a complex migration to coordinate and execute across multiple teams. In addition, licensing costs were restrictive to their growth.
Wizeline helped us scale quickly, and more importantly understood our high standards for quality, cultural fit, and gender diversity. The partnership with Wizeline has built an immense amount of trust as we establish our own Mexico Regional Office.
– Mike Fisher, Former Chief Technology Officer, Etsy
Our Solution: Modernizing Data To Create an Innovation Runway
The Wizeline team collaborated with Etsy to rearchitect their data platform, from on-prem to cloud-native Lakehouse on Google Cloud.
We also shifted rollups to native BigQuery processing for near-real-time analytics, ran cross-team validation to guarantee completeness and rapid adoption, and catalogued all datasets and jobs to ensure data governance.
Results: Improving System Performance, Accelerating Decision-Making and Value Creation
Eliminating on-prem hardware renewals and Vertica licensing resulted in 30 % lower TCO, with funds being allocated directly back into product innovation. Wizeline improved system performance and increased the data warehouse from 750 terabytes to 1.5 petabytes, enabling analysts to query petabyte-scale data in seconds and accelerating decision-making, feature experimentation, and value creation. Productivity was also boosted, as data engineers spend >40 % more time on new models and insights instead of routine platform care. Last, innovation has been unleashed, with the cloud foundation unlocking advanced Google AI/ML services (e.g., Vertex AI), powering fraud-detection prototypes and personalized search pilots.
The Etsy team not only modernized their data, they also optimized their overall business process.
To learn more about Wizeline’s Google Cloud capabilities, visit our page on the Google Partner Directory or contact us at consulting@wizeline.com.
