Update 2: EBay's Randy Shoup spills the secrets of how to service hundreds of millions of users and over two billion page views a day in Scalability Best Practices: Lessons from eBay on InfoQ. The practices: Partition by Function, Split Horizontally, Avoid Distributed Transactions, Decouple Functions Asynchronously, Move Processing To Asynchronous Flows, Virtualize At All Levels, Cache Appropriately.
Update: eBay Serves 5 Billion API Calls Each Month. Aren't we seeing more and more traffic driven by mashups composed on top of open APIs? APIs are no longer a bolt on, they are your application. Architecturally that argues for implementing your own application around the same APIs developers and users employ.
Who hasn't wondered how eBay does their business? As one of the largest most loaded websites in the world, it can't be easy. And the subtitle of the presentation hints at how creating such a monster system requires true engineering: Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost.
You may not be able to emulate how eBay scales their system, but the issues and possible solutions are worth learning from.
What's Inside?This information was adapted from Johannes Ernst's Blog
– Horizontal scaling at every tier.
– Functional decomposition.
– Minimize availability coupling.
– Improve scaling options.
– Reduce physical dependencies.
– Improve deployment flexibility.
– Automated failure detection and notification.
– “Limp mode” operation of business features.