Engineering Blog

We are excited to announce the public release of NuRaft, a lightweight C++ Raft core, under the Apache 2.0 open source license. NuRaft is based on the cornerstone C++ Raft implementation, but with various additions and changes, and is the result of over two years of development and testing for production use within eBay for storage server data replication. This post discusses what NuRaft is, and how it can be used.

The item page is one of the most critical pages in the eBay buyer experience. It's where a buyer make their purchase decisions. It's also one of the pages in eBay that gets the most user traffic. The speed of this page and showing accurate information to the user is of great importance. Item fast light service was developed to get critical item information as quickly as possible from the primary source tables. This service is currently used in a number of applications to achieve functionalities that needs 100% accuracy with lightning speed and performance of less than 10ms for an item.

APIs allow organizations to give their partners access to data and capabilities, at scale. Extensible and adaptable API ecosystems make it easier for developers to innovate. Building such an ecosystem is a progressive journey with many technical challenges.

At eBay, we switched one of our monitoring tech stacks from legacy homegrown architecture to a Druid-based real-time monitoring system. In this article, we discuss how we transitioned our journey to a new stack and also the benefits it has to offer.

From the time it was announced, WebAssembly caused a huge buzz in the front-end world. The web community readily embraced the idea of taking code written in programming languages other than JavaScript and running that code in the browser. Above all WebAssembly consistently guarantees native speeds much faster than JavaScript. At eBay, we were no different.

We're excited to announce the public release of Akutan, a distributed knowledge graph store, under the Apache 2.0 open source license. Akutan is the result of four person-years of exploration and engineering effort, so there's a lot to unpack here! This post will discuss what Akutan is, how it's implemented, and why we've chosen to release it as open source.

Data Structures are the basic building blocks of software. In this article, one eBay engineer gives his perspective on how they might have evolved over time, enabling us to build complex things out of simpler parts.

Shutl has been running an initiative called Swapping Fridays. This involves software engineers and customer service agents swapping roles for a day. This article discusses how the initiative was run, the objectives and outcomes, and some challenges that were encountered along the way.

At eBay, nearly everything we do is based on data. We deal with structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data, where Hadoop, as a big data platform, has provided key technology features. Keeping pace with the speed of innovation while continuing to help data consumers easily find and consume the data they need guides our architecture and investment in building out eBay’s Big Data Fabric.