WSO2 ESB Helps to Ensure High Performance and 24x7 Availability During Peak Holiday Shopping Season
eBay is the world's largest online marketplace. Today,
more than 94 million active users around the globe flock
to eBay to find the best deals in cyberspace. In 2010
alone, the total value of goods sold on eBay was a
staggering $62 billion or $2,000 every second.
Along with eBay's success comes a huge demand to
ensure reliable, 24x7 availability of the services that
enable these transactions. There's no room for error,
especially during the peak online holiday shopping
season. For eBay, that has meant using the WSO2 Enterprise
Service Bus (WSO2 ESB) to carry more than 1 billion
transactions per day during peak shopping times in
2010.
Planning for Growth
In 2009, eBay assessed whether its custom technology
infrastructure could scale to support the company's rapidly
growing business with consistently high performance and
reliability. After evaluating, the IT team realized the need
for an improved approach.
"The solutions we were using no longer met our needs, so
we considered whether to build a new internal system or
to adopt third-party technology," said Abhinav Kumar,
senior manager of systems engineering at eBay. "Strategically,
we saw several benefits from working with a thirdparty
solution, so we evaluated a number of products on
the market."
A couple of key considerations played into eBay's decision.
First, eBay wanted to accommodate enhanced service
mediation and orchestration capabilities to its existing
service-oriented architecture, in order to enhance its
business services. Additionally, any solution implemented
would need the scalability and performance to sustain the
increasing trafic loads of eBay's fast-growing customer
base.
"
We look two to five years ahead when
adopting a new product because we
expect it to serve our needs today and in
the future as well
"
Abhinav
WSO2 ESB Tops eBay's Evaluation
For six months, eBay evaluated several industry's leading
hardware and software ESB solutions, looking at both open
source and commercially licensed ESBs.
"Open source technology is important as we drive innovation
across our platform, and including open source
alternatives in our evaluation was a natural fit." Abhinav
noted.
eBay employed a deep analysis of each competing ESB
product that went far beyond a review of the feature sheet.
The company reviewed product architectures and
completed performance evaluations, often working with
vendors to get the most accurate picture possible.
To facilitate review of the WSO2 ESB, WSO2 offered eBay
complementary evaluation support that included 24-hour
inquiry-facilities where WSO2 engineers were available to
eBay anytime of the day for urgent calls and queries.
During this period, eBay tested the WSO2 ESB under
extreme traffic loads, and WSO2 architects and engineers
provided the eBay IT team with technical support for
validating its performance. Such as performance, including
builds and patches for the WSO2 ESB on Redhat Linux.
"
During evaluation,
WSO2 ESB
outperformed all
other ESB options
in both speed and
reliability."
Abhinav
After a comprehensive evaluation process, eBay selected
the 100% open source WSO2 ESB as the best product
capable of handling the middleware requirements of
eBay's online marketplace. The WSO2 ESB outperformed all
other software options in both speed and reliability. Moreover,
unlike ESB hardware, the WSO2 ESB demonstrated
the flexibility to grow and adapt to eBay's evolving requirements
for handling transformations, orchestrations, and
complex message flows.
WSO2 ESB Delivers on Scalability Promise
Within a few months of choosing the WSO2 ESB in 2009,
eBay had an initial deployment in place that handled
roughly one million calls per day during the 2009 holiday
shopping season.
Just 1 year later, all of the eBay services that are exposed
to e-commerce are mediated through WSO2 ESBs -
handling more than 1 billion calls per day. WSO2 ESBs
have also begun to handle some internal eBay use cases.
There are now several pools of WSO2 ESB servers, which
are deployed in a shared-nothing architecture, running
on RedHat Linux and set up on multi-core X86 Intel
processors. Each pool of high-end WSO2 ESB servers is provisioning one of three use cases that support eBay’s
various business functions: routing, orchestration, and
service chaining. These deployments currently include
dozens WSO2 ESB instances, which altogether accommodate
external and internal traffic loads from different
functional areas such as shopping, trading, checkout, and
mobile, to name a few.
The resource utilization of the WSO2 ESB is very efficient,
allowing massive deployments to run on a minimum
amount of servers, saving time and money for the
customers. Additionally, the memory usage of the WSO2
ESB instances remains stable irrespective of the traffic
load fluctuations at eBay to ensure high availability. The
following graph depicts the at memory-usage of the
WSO2 ESB instances during a period of one month
including Cyber Monday 2010.
Clustered architecture allowing better availability and improved performance
Memory usage for all ESB instances is significantly less than 2.0GB at all times
Because the WSO2 ESB instances easily inter-operate with
eBay's in-house and third-party monitoring systems, they
have helped to improve the overall monitoring capabilities
of the system.
With the use of WSO2 ESB deployments, eBay successfully
provided a reliable and an efficient shopping experience
to its vast customer base worldwide, much to the delight
of the eBay’s management team and the customers.
Using the WSO2 ESBs, we've been able to provide customers
and partners with the quality experience they expect
on eBay, even as our global customer base has grown,"
Abhinav ovserved.
"Using WSO2 ESBs, we've been able
to provide customers and partners
with the quality experience they
expect on eBay."
Abhinav
World-Class,
On-Premise Support
Services from WSO2
Given the central role the WSO2 ESBs play, eBay has
engaged WSO2's support team during critical deployments.
Significantly, the same WSO2 architects and
engineers who have been involved with product design
and development also provide support, ensuring a deep
knowledge of the technology.
Typically during critical new deployments eBay engages a
specialist architect from WSO2, who works onsite with
eBay's engineering team to ensure that the deployment is
completed smoothly. This best practice approach has
ensured timely, high-quality completion of the entire
project. For example, the WSO2 support team was able to
resolve and patch a bug in the WSO2 ESB, in which performance
diminished after 1 billion messages went through a
particular system. This limitation no longer exists. Additionally,
the WSO2 support team provided eBay with several
workaround solutions and patches to enable the system to
interact with clients that do not properly comply with the
HTTP specifications.
eBay Continues
Expansion of WSO2 ESB
Deployments
Based on the proven performance, resource utilization
and scalability of the current WSO2 ESB instances, eBay
already has planned several future deployments with
WSO2 including the use of REST gateway deployments
and federated ESBs.
"eBay is one of the e-commerce leaders of the world, and
our technology is world-class. We use products such as
the WSO2 ESB that help us to effectively manage our
efficiency, scalability and security requirements," said
Abhinav. "From a business perspective, we have met our
goals to date. We're invested in the WSO2 ESB and plan to
continue investing in it."
