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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.
A+++++++ good article, would read again
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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What, no Patch Tuesdays?
Nope, they have Patch-Every-Other Tuesdays instead.
Summation 2
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.
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.
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
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.
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