Delivering eBay's Virtual Economy

Abstract:
eBay's infrastructure is perhaps atypical of those of today's enterprises, but it is likely that it is typical of what many enterprise infrastructures will become in the future: the combination of a platform, essentially comprised of vast numbers of networked commodity, and notionally cheap, components, delivering a more or less continuously available set of massively distributed web services. In the case of eBay these resolve to a virtual economy. This presentation will describe how eBay evolved and created this massively horizontally scaling infrastructure, delivering high quality of service and business agility, what the challenges are that arise from this success and how these are being addressed. Key areas covered include -
Delivering massive scale - databases and applications.
Paying the price of success - how do you manage this kind of complexity?
A holistic approach to a solution - turning your infrastructure into a system.

Speaker Bio:
Paul Strong is a distinguished engineer at eBay Research Labs. He is focused on enterprise grid architectures and technologies, and is driving the long term vision and strategy for eBay's infrastructure and enterprise management within that context. Additionally Paul is active within the Grid standards community and is acting chair of the Open Grid Forum (OGF) board of directors and co-chair of the OGF Reference Model Working Group. Prior to joining eBay, Strong was a systems architect at Sun Microsystems where he focused on grid standards and the N1 products. He was part of the original N1 team, and co-authored the book Building N1 Grid Solutions (Prentice Hall, 2004). Strong was chair of the Enterprise Grid Alliance technical steering committee and its reference model working group, where he edited/co-authored the EGA Reference Model. He holds a B.Sc. in physics from the University of Manchester, England. Paul lives in California with his wife and daughter, and when time permits plays suitably complex music, involving a large number of microprocessors, in the band Fractal (http://www.fractal-continuum.com).

Links to recent publications:
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/1556523.html
http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=265069
http://www.gridtoday.com/grid/875717.html
http://www.gridworld.com/live/42/events/42WDC06A/SN998717/bio//CMONYA00BE6O