Avoiding Cascading Failures at eBay?

eBay is a well-known leader in online marketplaces with more than three billion page views per day. eBay is the sixth largest compute footprint on planet Earth enabling billions of dollars of commerce among upwards of 162 million people in over 100 countries. The infrastructure contains tens of thousands of compute nodes running thousands of applications, hundreds of databases, multiple thousands of network devices. Failures can happen at any infrastructure, platform, framework, application stack layers or even at the availability zone(region) level. Our goal is to ensure that failures at a certain stack layer are not compounded by cascading to various upstream layers causing total system/service outage. This topic addresses automation capabilities that our engineering teams have built to mark up/down data and service paths to ensure the consistent user experience. We will also go over some of the case studies in shifting the traffic from the failed zones(region) to healthy zones(region).

Ravindra Punati has had many senior roles at eBay and is presently the senior leader of the Site Reliability Engineering team. In other roles at eBay Ravi has been responsible for the infrastructure automation initiatives and cloud operations. Ravi brings extensive expertise in the fields of database engineering, application development and software as a service product lines. In addition to holding multiple degrees in computer science Ravi has held several roles as an engineer, architect, manager and executive in various Silicon Valley start-ups.

Craig is presently a Senior Technical Duty Officer at eBay and is responsible for commanding all types of large scale site incidents. In addition to an undergraduate degree, Craig holds numerous professional certifications related to the computer industry (RHCE, SSCA, ITIL and etc.). Craig has held several roles at multiple start-up and fortune 500 companies such as Senior Systems Engineer, Project Manager, Presenter and Major Incident Commander.