How eBay Works for Developer Speed – InApps 2022

InApps‘s recent livestream podcast covered a lot of ground about eBay‘s five successive attempts at reengineering its IT architecture.

Hosted by Alex Williams, founder and publisher of InApps, this recording features eBay guests Randy Shoup, vice president, engineering and chief architect; Mark Weinberg, vice president, core product engineering; and Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh, vice president, buyer experience engineering offered their insight and lessons learned over pancakes.

The e-commerce giant eBay has continually faced a number of challenges as it re-engineered its architecture to, among other things, increase the cadence of deployments and software updates per day, in order to ultimately improve the user experience for its online customers. “What we decided to do was to laser focus on that software delivery point,” said Shoup. “We need to be able to deliver software, like quickly, repeatedly and reliably to do any of the upstream architectural improvements, we’d like to make.”

The DevOps team of eBay’s keeps a “general approach looking at small wins and long-term capabilities,” Weinberg explained.

“If we could save an engineer 10 minutes on a task, multiplied by that engineer doing that task multiple times a day, multiplied by every day in the year multiplied by every engineer in the entire org, that turns into actually quite a big win,” said Weinberg. “But then there’s also some longer-term capabilities that we know that we need to deliver on, things like rearchitecting some of our code — those are bigger changes, [with a] bigger impact with bigger risks, but we know we need to do that.”

How eBay Is Working for Developer Speed

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DevOps team culture, and more specifically, has looked for ways to included shared goals, collaboration and breaking down silos. “It’s critical that all the teams across eBay need to work towards a common goal and a shared goal. And we are clearly seeing a cultural change that’s happening, where people are thinking about end-to-end and they are consciously breaking down silos,” said Duraivenkatesh. “It’s not easy, but people are talking about it. And, also, we are seeing that everyone is thinking about, ‘okay, what is the outcome that I want to achieve for this particular initiative? And how can we work together towards that particular initiative.’ So there’s a lot of change that’s happening.”