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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
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.
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