Etsy stopped running its own GitHub Enterprise Server and moved repositories to GitHub Enterprise Cloud, trading infrastructure self-reliance for third-party service.

Etsy had always hosted its code on GitHub — but on a GitHub Enterprise Server installation the company managed itself. That meant Etsy engineers owned the hardware and the maintenance underneath their developer tools, on top of owning the marketplace that connects 3.1 million sellers to more than 60 million shoppers.

In 2018 the strategy changed. The organization decided to step away from maintaining infrastructure and focus on building the best customer experience it could. Moving to Google Cloud kicked off what the team describes as a deeper paradigm shift: from infrastructure self-reliance to best-in-class service providers.

Etsy’s mobile repository now lives in the cloud on GitHub. Because CI configuration moved into the repository alongside the code, any change to a check arrives as a pull request and has to pass CI before it merges. Engineers can add or tweak checks without disrupting the team, and they can run the same steps locally — “Everything that runs tests are either Fastlane lanes or Gradle tasks,” said Senior iOS Engineer Mike Simons, “so the difference between CI and local development is much smaller.”

Because of that, code review got stricter rather than looser. “Before the migration, folks could get fast and loose about code reviews,” Simons said. “Now we have up to 10 separate checks that run on every commit that’s pushed.” Etsy deploys to production more than 50 times a day, and coordinates release trains in Slack, where engineers receive pull requests, reviews, and notifications. The coordination hub is a Google App Engine app tied together by the GitHub API, named Farnsworth “because it’s always delivering good news.”

There was no big bang. Driven by the larger move to Google Cloud, engineers started migrating repositories from GitHub Enterprise Server to Enterprise Cloud with the help of GitHub Professional Services. Simons joined Etsy during the home stretch of what the story describes as a two-year migration.

The move was partial. The mobile repository lives in Enterprise Cloud, but 75 percent of Etsy’s code base is still in the self-hosted GitHub Enterprise installation in Google Cloud. And the trade Etsy made is a real one: it swapped infrastructure it controlled for a service someone else runs, deliberately, as company strategy.

What it bought was leverage. Pull requests can trigger ad hoc builds that install on devices, giving product managers, designers, and QA staff earlier visibility. All repositories are set to internal, which Chief Architect Keyur Govande frames as innersource and a discoverability tool: “Everyone should be able to read the code that powers etsy.com and contribute to the broader success of the company.”

A tools migration doesn’t have to finish to pay off — Etsy got faster releases and stricter checks with three-quarters of its code still on the old system, because the wins came from moving the build configuration into the repository, not from the hosting change alone.