Years back eBay outage made international headline news. Things have substantially improved ever since. Have you ever wondered how these massive sites are built, maintained and improved. The evolution of the eBay architecture captured as a set of slides by Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett makes interesting reading. As much as I like the architecture and its continual evolution, I like the presentation style as well - cut to the chase and after a long time seeing a technical presentation thats without jargon.
Look at eBay's scale and complexity. It manages 212,000,000 registered users with over 1 billion photos, 105 million listings at any time, eBay users worldwide trade more than $1500 worth of goods every second. Clocking 1 billion pageviews every day, eBay is a modern day miracle. eBay is said to be storing 2 Petabytes of data – 200 times the size of the library of congress and the platform handles 3 billion API calls/month. A sense of the dynamism involved is best illustrated by facts about scale and complexity of eBay operations like as under:
- 300 + features per quarter
- 100,000 LOC rolled out every two weeks
- >26 billion SQL executions/day
A very interesting talk for anyone who is working or wanting to work on architecting big websites.This is the sort of wisdom that mere formal education won’t provide. This is distilled wisdom based on years of experience. I can relate to the massive efforts(knowing very well how very large sites are built, maintained and extended, I can relate to every word there in the slide and am amazed at the efforts that have gone into the metamorphosis of the architecture – its to be noted that the architecture is slated to further evolve – indication of good characteristics there.) that go in maintaining such megasites and continually rearchitecting over a period of time.
Joe Gregorio sees similarity in the approach with that of Google as can be seen here. Greg Linden points to similarities with Amazon architecture. eBay, Google & Amazon are not only internet business model pioneers but are also technology icons – the very fact that they keep innovating architecture while working on changing business models( a very commendable engagement) make them special icons in the world of business.
Category :eBay Architecture, Emerging Trends
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