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Stability, Agility, Scalability, and Cost: The eBay Example
By: Paul Vallee
Anyone interested in the architecture of highly scalable and stable infrastructure will enjoy this Presentation by Randy Shoup and Dan Pritchett of Ebay on how they, in their words, “strike a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance, and cost.”
Key takeaways: 300 new features per quarter, 26 billion sql executions per day, 99.94% available in real life.
Nice work, guys.
Dec 8, 2006
Category: Group Blog Posts
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Nice work, eh?
“No business logic in database”
“Move CPU-intensive work to applications”
” - Referential integrity”
” - Joins”
” - Sorting”
“Auto-commit for vast majority of DB writes”
I wonder what TK would have to say about this…
Hi Szilard,
Yeah, I noticed that. Speaking as a purist myself, do you think this was doable at all without those compromises?
My personal database scalability experience tops out at 20 million users and under 100,000 online simultaneously. I can tell you without hesitating that even to do that required some serious out-of-the-box thinking and more than a few compromises that would have had Ted Codd spinning in his grave and Ray Boyce spitting in my eye. (Can anyone confirm Boyce is still with us?)
Cheers
Paul
Szilard,
Many high end systems would move a lot of traditional database activities to application tier simply because it’s much easier to scale there as opposed to database tier. Other consideration could be licensing costs - especially if it’s Oracle database.
Speaking about Tom Kyte - he often says “If it’s printed, doesn’t mean it’s true”.
In this case it’s applicable to both - his approaches and referenced white paper.
What a beast of a system…. imagine what it’ll be like in 5 - 10 years time.
They’ve applied the ‘Divide and Conquer’ technique to good affect. And it’s pretty clear from reading this that it’s not some thing that could’ve been resolved with RAC either. The model employed by these guys contradicts the “shared everything” architecture model which is the basis for RAC, and it’s working!
It turns out Johannes Ernst attended the actual presentation and made some very interesting observations and notes about the system and the way that it works.