eBay makes a bid for the SOA business

eBay has taken a page from Amazon's playbook and is offering pieces of its infrastructure technology to the world at large. Only rather than offering infrastructure services on a pay-as-you-go basis, eBay is open-sourcing its infrastructure code to the wider community.

Last week, the mega-market company launched a Website for its open source initiative, which features a beta version of Project Turmeric, a Java-based SOA platform, Auctionbytes.com reports.

eBay provides details about its Tumeric offering:

"Turmeric is a comprehensive, policy-driven SOA platform that you can use to develop, deploy, secure, run and monitor SOA services and consumers. It is a Java based platform, follows the core standards (WSDL, SOAP, XML, JSON, XACML, REST), and supports a variety of protocols and data formats. Eclipse plugins help with the development of services and consumers."

Components of the offering include runtime code, Eclipse plug-ins, security services, and a monitoring console and policy administration. There are no dependencies on internal eBay applications. eBay says Tumeric is part of its decision to open source some of the standards-based technologies it has used to power its online marketplaces.

The availability of open-source SOA platforms such as this may be another way SOA will filter to unserved and underserved markets. And a platform that has already proven to handle millions of transactions a day with 90 million users is a pretty good bet in terms of scalability.