For online auction powerhouse eBay, customer support is everything. Or, as Parantap Lahiri, vice president of network and data center engineering, puts it, “We want to make the network more like air or water, so our people don’t have to fret about network resources when creating magical services for our users.”
The needs on the eBay facilities are staggering: 1.8 billion active listings; 133 million active purchasers. It’s primary landing page gets 250 million visits per day. Unlike a static shop website like Amazon, an eBay auction can entail multiple bidders from all over the world contending versus each other as the clock ticks down to completion of the auction. And the eBay platform supports direct interaction between sellers and purchasers, with deals and counteroffers flying back and forth.On top of the duty for maintaining a network facilities that can support current traffic levels, eBay designers are constantly coming up with new site features that leverage data intensive innovations like AI and machine learning.In a vibrant move aimed at cutting costs, increasing bandwidth and providing network capacity for several years to come, Lahiri constructed a 400Gbps Ethernet fabric for its on-prem information centers based on white-box switches running the open source SONiC running system.(SONiC, or Software for Open Networking in the Cloud, was established by Microsoft for its Azure cloud information centers, then launched to the open-source community in 2016. It is presently part of the Linux Structure.)Data-center modernization was needed.eBay is one the original cloud companies; it performed its very first online auction in 1995. But in many ways eBay is no different from any company closing in on its 30th birthday: It has tradition
on-premises data centers built on innovation that required to be upgraded. Lahiri says that in 2015 he began considering changing his conventional Layer 2 data-center network with a Layer 3 IP-based network, and to update from 100Gbps Ethernet to 400Gpst. He says that the conventional Layer 2 domains weren’t steady sufficient or scalable enough for eBay’s
growing requirements.When he started pricing 400Gig technology, consisting of the optics, silicon, and switch hardware, he found it was just too costly, so he decided to examine the open-source choice, which is strongly in line with the corporate culture. The eBay technique to innovation in basic is do-it-yourself, innovative, and decidedly
open source. In truth, eBay constructs its own custom-made servers. It built its own item data store called NuData. And it leans greatly on open-source tools like MongoDB and Hadoop for database, the Apache Kafka streaming platform, and Docker and Kubernetes
for developing and orchestrating containerized applications.In 2019, Lahiri put a SONiC box into the production network and monitored it for efficiency and stability for more than a year prior to going all-in on the white box/SONiC route. As of today, Lahiri has actually decommissioned what he calls the “old-fashioned “footprints and has deployed a SONiC-based network fabric in production in all active information centers. From here on out, all brand-new capability implementations will be SONiC-based, he says.One of the common concerns connected with this method is whether the IT group has the know-how and bandwidth to set up, keep an eye on, keep, and troubleshoot the network.Lahiri says it’s not as hard as it might look. “I do have a terrific networking group, however it’s not huge,” he says.” The total entryway barrier has actually decreased … Source
