An Inside Look At eBay's Technology

endychavez writes with a CIO Insight profile giving a look inside eBay and its technology platform. The company has 40,000 outside developers working to increase its value and efficiency. From the article: "'They are way ahead of other companies' in terms of supporting developers, says one application builder... 'This a new wave of business,' says [another developer's marketing director]. 'eBay is a supplier, a marketing channel and a competitor. It's a weird arrangement.' ... 'If you can't split it, you can't scale it,' says Eric Billingsley, head of eBay Research Labs. 'We've made ourselves masters of virtualization.' ... eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use."

Comments

100'000 lines of code every fortnight?

[arevos]

The result: eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks, adding 100,000 lines of code, all while in use.

Why would eBay need to add that quantity of code every fortnight? It doesn't strike me as an indicator of very efficient programming.

in other ebay news

[asv108]

Ebay announced a signifigant price increase. Since online auctions are a natural monopoly, I guess we will continue to see these types of price increases until people finally get fed up enough to start listing items elsewhere.

Poor priorities

[AnalogDiehard]

All those developers, while little is done to combat fraud on ebay.