eBay: Scale!

1. What is the problem? Is the problem real?
As a site that caters 2 billion page views a day resulting in $60 billion transactions every year, eBay definitely places a problem of scaling up to the demands. Maintaining such large-scale systems is a very real problem and is faced by most companies in the business of web-based services.

2. What is the solution's main idea (nugget)?
The solution to this is based on five basic principles: partition everything, introduce asynchrony, automatically adjust configurations and learn various characteristics including user behavior, be prepared for failure and handle them gracefully, and have a spectrum of consistency and apply appropriately. While these are fairly well-known principles now in the distributed systems world, their relevance cannot be tested in more demanding circumstances than modern datacenters. Their deployment includes third-party clouds too, making the problem harder and necessitating some checks to avoid some common erroneous assumptions about modeling, portability and utilization of resources.

3. Why is solution different from previous work?
In addition to these guarantees, the slides also talk about addressing emerging challenges about energy efficiency as well as workload characterization useful for prediction of “floods”. Modeling workloads is an especially useful research problem that has implications in resource provisioning and quality of service, energy-efficient designs and statistical multiplexing of resources.

4. Do you think the work will be influential in 10 years? Why or why not?
These are all very definite and real problems to solve. Principles as well as solutions that arise out of this work will definitely be influential, both immediately as well as in future.

5. Others:
Third-party clouds is pretty interesting – but as a service dealing with large number of customers, I wonder what are the privacy implications.