BUSINESS: eBay Infrastructure

via Adding Simplicity

Laurent has sent me (for a while...) this interesting presentation concerning the eBay infrastructure (Nov 2006).

eBay, some figures from end 2006

• in 33 countries, in 7 languages, 24x7, 99.94% availability


• number of registered users: 212 million


• number of pageviews per day: over 1 billion


• volume of data stored: over 2 PB (petabytes)


• number of API calls per month: 3 billion


• number of SQL executions per day: over 26 billion

Code production

• about 6 million LOC (Line Of Code) in production


• 300 new features per quarter


• 100'000 lines of code rolled-out every 2 weeks


• entire site rolled every 2 weeks


• about 100 WAR config

Architecture Lessons Learnt

• horizontal scaling at every tier


• prefer asynchronous integration


• virtualize components


• automated failure detection and notification

Current architecture

• since 2002, a J2EE architecture


• MSXML framework for the presentation layer


• no stored procedure


• extensive use of prepared statements and bind variables


• scales on servlets and a rewritten connection pool


• keep Application Tier completely stateless


• cache where possible


• strictly partition application into tiers: presentation, business, integration

Tags: ebay - architecture - infrastructure