As a Java architect, I’ve always been curious to learn about what makes large, enterprise Java systems tick. One of the biggest Java systems out there is certainly eBay, and if you want to know more about its architecture, now you can read the slides of an SDForum presentation titled “The eBay Architecture – Striking a balance between site stability, feature velocity, performance and cost”.
Attending the live talk would have been great, but even form the slides only (PDF version here), there are many important lessons in there, particularly regarding scalability. Some of them are nuggets of often repeated wisdom, like “Keep application tier completely stateless” and “Cache where possible”. Others are more unexpected, like:
- Throw out most of J2EE, and
- No business logic in database (no stored procedures and only very simple triggers).
All in all, a very good read.
Well,
As someone who knows this very well having worked with IBM at EBay, take all this with a pitch of salt. There are lots of lessons learned there but EBay is a very particular application and by no means a general case. They do things a certain way thats pretty unique. So, while interesting, I wouldn’t make wide ranging statements based on this. It does how-ever work for them.