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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."
a huge furnace that burns large piles of money, explaining the ever increasing fee structure.
Why would eBay need to add that quantity of code every fortnight? It doesn't strike me as an indicator of very efficient programming.
Have they managed to invent code yet that will actually allow them to insert a new item without it costing them money? Maybe then they'd be able to drop a listing fee for the privilege of serving some a customized HTML page to their visitors.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
A+++++++ good article, would read again
So far TL2 is much better than the previous attempts. Unfortunately the site itself has gone to shit with all the powersellers category flooding.
"eBay is able to publish a new version of its site every two weeks"
Can someone tell me why this is viewed as a good thing?
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Do these guys know that you can use stuff like CGI to make dynamic web sites, with databases? With 40,000 developers, and 100,000 lines of code every two weeks, somebody should tell them that they don't have to code each and every single page by hand...
Apologies for the caps and for the swearing, but what the fuck?
Want to improve eBay's efficiency? Ditch 39,500 of those developers.
Or by developers do they mean "people who have downloaded the API docs"?
That means 2.5 lines of code per developer every two weeks!
Fun and games aside, what's the big deal with upgrading a live site? I write software that builds and packages itself and then deploys it's own code to itself in production while it's running. No issues here...
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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.
...and loads of money. Yet last time I looked the site went offline every Friday "for maintenance". Please, ebay, teach us your highly innovative processes!
Yes, but do you have millions of people connected while you do that? And do you have millions of database trasnsactions and to-the-second sensitive activities going on while you roll out your code live?
In other words, that count represents the total number of people worldwide writing code that interfaces with eBay. That's very different than 40K developers working for eBay.
Just a few thousand people, but it does involve millions of dollars in work for a company in the top 15 of the fortune 500.
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All your Bays are belo... Oh, never mind.
eBay is merely 458th on the 2006 Fortune 500 list. It's not the top performer it would have you believe. It is likely, however, in the top five when it comes to poor customer service.
3 years ago? They've rewritten the site 78 times since then! They've added 7.8 million lines of code! Get with the program, man!
All those developers, while little is done to combat fraud on ebay.
Eternity: will that be smoking, or non-smoking? I Corinthians 6:9-10
"'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.'
Too bad they didn't support the people who buy merchandise through the site that well.
Having been a regular eBay user for a while I can't get away from an image of a huge room housing 40,000 loudly screaming chimpanzees banging away at their terminals. Oh, and some dude in the room next door swimming in his Scrooge McDuck style money pit while laughing manically....
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
A natural monopoly is a monopoly that comes to exist all on it's own, and can usually be predicted far in advance. It will exist even in spite of competition.
eBay is a natural monopoly because a dominant online auction has a self-reinforcing properties. It's not simple for a buyer to switch to another auction site, because it will not have many listings, so they won't find what they want to buy. And it's not simple for a seller to switch to another site, because no one goes there to buy things (because there are no sellers), so you don't sell anything.
It's a huge catch-22 situation. These kinds of monopolies usually take drastic change to break - some huge event that will cause a critical mass of buyers and sellers to move to another site. As long as eBays price increases stay small and incremental, it is unlikely this will occur.
I think poor is a gross over statement of their service level.
That their phone number is a closely gaurded secret gives you an inkling to their thoughts on the whole thing.
And just try to get into their offices to speak to someone!!! I tried once in order to deliver papers I had picked up from the local court - they wouldn't even let me in the building or send someone to the door to take receipt of the papers!! (Richmond upon thames offices, fairly well hidden but I used to walk past them daily on the way to work)
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someone claimed that Slate.com is able to published 100000 pages within a matter of seconds.
If you think this article will tell you what hardware and OS's they're running on you'll be disappointed. It's mostly web 2.0 fluff spared any useful details.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
This would appear to suggest that these are developers independent of eBay and not employed by them. On the other hand:
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. The system is never taken off-line for upgrades or maintenance.It doesn't sound as if the 100,000 lines of code are from the 40,000 independent developers. Creating an application to interface with the eBay API doesn't seem to equate to publishing "a new version of its site". Of course, it's possible that the article has made a mistake.
I reckon it's like the cottage industry that grew up around I-pods, you're not going to invent the Ipod (or Ebay) so why not just make be-jeweled holders or kickass speakers and skim some revenue off the top?
Ebays in a win-win sitch as they get site & product expansion without really having to pay for it. I wonder if they own part of the IP at the end of the day.
I've noticed a similar Open API peripheral strategy with other sites - like FLICKR and even Myspace to a lessor extent. Flickr has a few apps that are really fun like the calender or DVD maker - but they are obviously done by 3rd party devs and Flicker even solicits devs for new ideas.
You had me at merlot
Your comment number was 17459304. You're looking for comment number 17459144.
They interviewed me a couple months back and despite several emails that included my full sigunature and my full name, they totally flubbed it in the article. My name is Jonathan Field, and somehow they got my name as Jon Athan. Page after page of things like "Athan says this" and "according to Athan's development philosophy".
;)
Back at the office they made me new "Jon Athan" buisiness cards as a joke.
Bitches.
Ah, no. Maybe I didn't phrase that well. I completely agree with you. I meant that eBay is most certainly in the bottom 5 of the league of Customer Service. In fact probably the only company in my experience that proves worse customer service is Paypal, owned of course by eBay.
Hey eBay... How 'bout spending some time to allow me to display listing times in MY time zone? Thanks.
I used to work at e-bay. They are masters of NOT VERY MUCH. Their QA support is a shamble. The treatment of employees is delporeable. Their culture is incapable of Human compassion. They berate, intimidate, and exasaberate their collegues into submission. That is how the work gets done.. They say that 1 out of every 10 employees is a millionarre on paper and really dont need to work, but do because they have nothing better to do (stated in their own words), unfortunately that carries over to how they treat others and how they are treated themselves. Unfortunately its a vicious cycle that is only quenched by greed and money (not money paid to the individual or credit, but paid to the "greater cause".) I hope this culture has changed for the better, if so I stand corrected and profusely apologize for my (would be) incorrect rebuttal and retract it as such. In my opinion, its like FRY's, how much can we push people to give us what we want, and how much can we treat them like nothing before we have to get rid of them before they find better treatment elsewhere and get rid of us.. This may or may not be on the subject of the article, but When I see e-bay and masters and innovation used in the same context, I have to stand up and say something.. To verify, approach an e-bay employee and ask them. I have nothing personal against any specific people at e-bay, and I do wish all of them and their families well into the new year..
Considering that it is a JMS multi-tiered app, sure - this is simple to do. That's what decoupling buys you. Try this with EJBs for example, and you're, well, clusterfucked wouldn't begin to describe it.
/.ers, I haven't RTFA for this post, just running on the last bit of info I read on eBay and their structure. However, since I just mentioned I didn't RTFA, I guess I'm not a good /.er!:)
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Developers! Developers! Developers!!!!! Sorry...... I had to..... :)
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100.000 lines a week, 40.000 developers makes it 2.5 lines of code every week (or was it 2 weeks?)
Hmm... we should all work for Ebay, I can shell out that many lines, provided, those lines are not as long as a whole book.
Or does that count include the modified lines of code too? Something is really phishy.
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Once again, a moderator who doesn't like me, mods the second post in a discussion as "redundant". Brilliant observation - may you burn in meta-mod hell.
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One system I wrote and now update and maintain has several thousand simultaneous internal users and typically around 100,000 public users on it at any given moment spread throughout about 95 countries, and it transfers over $100 billion in securities each year. We update it live once a month, and sometimes as often as once a week. I don't have millions of simultaneous users, but the dollar value and associated risk of each transaction is substantially higher.
The earlier poster is correct -- there isn't anything all that out of the ordinary about it.
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