eBay built its own servers in push to replatform its backend infrastructure
eBay has announced that it's built its own custom-designed servers as part of its three-year effort to replatform the company's backend infrastructure. The e-commerce marketplace player also intends to make the server designs available to the public via open source in Q4 of this year.
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The infrastructure replatforming effort -- which began more than two years ago -- includes designing eBay's own hardware and AI-engine, decentralizing their cluster of data centers, moving to an edge computing architecture and leveraging new developments around open source technologies.
eBay -- which has 175 million active users, over 1.1 billion live listings and a data footprint of more than 500 petabytes -- said the platform infrastructure revamp will help the company take advantage of new technologies and further improve efficiency, flexibility and scalability.
eBay said it took the company nine months to build its prototype and to deploy its custom hardware.
"We systematically went through each layer of our technology stack and examined efficiency, capability and the opportunity to improve existing solutions, Mazen Rawashdeh, VP of Platform Engineering for eBay, wrote in a blog post.
"It's worth noting that most of the time when companies undergo a replatforming effort like this, they need to increase their budget and it often takes several years. However, eBay has been able to replatform on an aggressive timeline without incremental cost and, in fact, we have reinvested savings back into the business."
eBay has made a number of technology-related announcements so far this year. Last month the company rolled out a series of API updates designed to spur marketplace growth through better buyer experiences. The e-commerce player has been focused on the developer community for the last couple of years as part of its growth plan, acknowledging that external developers drove more than $9.6 billion of gross merchandise volume globally and created more than 2.1 billion new listings in the first half of 2018.
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