Tech Blog Archive

Accessibility in Engineering

Introducing an Accessibility Linter for Marko: Shortening the Accessibility Testing Pipeline

Our goal: Help developers create better code, more efficiently, while maintaining accessibility for all.

By: Luke LaValva
Machine Learning in Engineering

eBay’s Blazingly Fast Billion-Scale Vector Similarity Engine

The Similarity Engine's use cases include item-to-item similarity for text and image modality and user-to-item personalized recommendations based on a user’s historical behavior data.

By: Santosh Shahane, Kui Yang, Leonard Dahlmann, Amarendra Belineni, Yan Sun, Shrivatsan Navalpakkam Rajagopalan and Pavel Petrushkov
Accessibility in Features

How eBay Made Its New Accessibility Tool — And Made It Available to All

Several eBay teams worked together to create a plug-in that makes it easy to include accessibility in a design right from the start.

By: Dan Nosowitz
Kubernetes in Engineering

Why and How eBay Pivoted to OpenTelemetry

eBay makes a crucial pivot to OpenTelemetry to better align with industry standards for Observability.

By: Vijay Samuel
Developer Tools in Engineering

OpenFeature, With Contributions From eBay, Submitted to CNCF's Sandbox Program

The new open feature flagging standard enables companies to deliver cloud-native applications more effectively.

By: Justin Abrahms, Principal Architect, Chair of eBay's Open Source Program
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

Rethink Modals Management in React

A small, zero-dependency utility to manage modals for React.

By: Nate Wang and Feng Xie
Java in Engineering

eBay Event Notification Platform: Listener SDKs

How eBay’s new event notification platform supports asynchronous communication for our API partners

By: Lokesh Rishi, Lead Software Engineer
Developer Tools in Engineering

Surfacing eBay Inventory Across the Web with the eBay Items Widget

The new open-source widget gives developers several layout options for displaying eBay inventory in third-party shopping experiences.

By: Lokesh Rishi, Lead Software Engineer
Hadoop in Engineering

From Vendor to In-house: How eBay Reimagined Its Analytics Landscape

Learn how eBay transitioned its analytics data platform from a vendor-based data warehouse to an open-source-based solution built by the team.

By: Medha Samant and Valerie Steinbrugge
Developer Tools in Engineering

eBay Launches Targeted Auto Retry

eBay’s open source Swift package provides powerful resilience against flaky test steps.

By: Evan Pierce, MTS, Software Engineer
Cloud in Engineering

How eBay Leverages Kubernetes, Helm Charts and Jenkins Pipelines to Deliver High-Quality Software

Learn how eBay has fully automated our software quality certification to enhance efficiency, minimize manual intervention, and scale for increasingly complex requests and combinations.

By: Zhong Shen, Rocky Shang and Ramit Bedi
OSS in Engineering

eBay Launches Marko 5

eBay’s open source JavaScript UI framework modernizes universal web development.

By: Ryan Carniato, Michael Rawlings and Dylan Piercey
Kubernetes in Engineering

Our Online Analytical Processing Journey with ClickHouse on Kubernetes

Learn about the latest evolution of online analytical processing (OLAP) data, now with ClickHouse on Kubernetes.

By: Sudeep Kumar, Mohan Garadi, Xiancheng Li, Amber Vaidya and Liangfei Su
Software Design in Engineering

Software Quality: Elevating the Game

Learn how software product quality goes well beyond simply avoiding bugs.

By: Lakshimi Duraivenkatesh
Mobile in Product

eBay Motors: Accelerating With Flutter™

The UI software development kit enables a consistent user experience across iOS and Android.

By: Corey Sprague and Larry McKenzie
Machine Learning in Engineering

eBay Open Source — 2019 in the Rear View Mirror; 2020 Ahead

As we move further into 2020, it’s worth reviewing a selection of key eBay Open Source projects released in 2019.

By: Brian D. Haslam
Developer Tools in Engineering

Safe ACL Change through Model-based Analysis

Model-based analysis makes it possible to rigorously test and validate changes prior to deployment. This approach enabled the eBay Network Engineering staff to undertake a project to refactor a large business critical Access Control List, resulting in an 80% reduction in size, without any adverse business impact.

By: Antonio Ceseracciu
Accessibility in Engineering

Automation via the Accessibility Ruleset Runner

Automated testing helps organizations build better software, faster. Automation can also be used to standardize user experiences or maintain code compliance. With respect to accessibility, automation can be used to bring awareness by helping people with little to no accessibility knowledge easily find, file and fix bugs.

By: Scott Izu, Ian McBurnie, Sean Gates and Valliappan Thenappan
Distributed Systems in Engineering

NuRaft: a Lightweight C++ Raft Core

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.

By: Gene Zhang and Jung-Sang Ahn
OSS in Engineering

Akutan: A Distributed Knowledge Graph Store

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.

By: Simon Fell and Diego Ongaro
Developer Tools in Engineering

eBay OAuth Client Library

To make integrations with eBay RESTful APIs easier, eBay provides client libraries in C# and Java to make it simpler to set up authorization and reduce the amount of code application developers have to write to get OAuth Access Tokens.

By: Sandeep Dhiman
Developer Tools in Engineering

Announcing the Accelerator

The Expertmaker Accelerator is a well-proven data processing framework that provides fast data access, parallel execution, and automatic organization of source code, input data, and results. It can be used for daily data analysis tasks as well as operating as a live recommendation system with hundreds of thousands of large data files and many CPUs. The Accelerator is now released as open source by eBay.

By: Anders Berkeman, Carl Drougge and Sofia Hörberg
JavaScript in Engineering

The Future of Marko

At eBay, we’ve completely transformed how we build web applications, starting with the transition from a Java-based stack to a Node.js-based stack. Node.js has enabled teams to move faster, and it offers an abundant ecosystem of tools and libraries that are essential to modern web application development.

By: Patrick Steele-Idem
Cloud in Engineering

Beats @ eBay - Collectbeat - A Journey where Company and Community Come Together

In early 2016, the Monitoring Special Interest Group (SIG) ventured into solving the problem of logs and metrics shipping from Tess.io (eBay’s Kubernetes ecosystem).

By: Vijay Samuel
Developer Tools in Engineering

Introducing Regressr - An Open Source Command Line Tool to Regression Test HTTP Services

In the Artificial Intelligence-Human Language Technologies team at eBay, we work on software that powers eBay’s conversational bot, ShopBot.

By: Ashwanth Fernando
Cloud in Engineering

Ready-to-use Virtual-machine Pool Store via warm-cache

Conventional on-demand Virtual Machine (VM) provisioning methods on a cloud platform can be time-consuming and error-prone, especially when we need to provision VMs in large numbers quickly.

By: Sudeep Kumar
Data Infrastructure and Services in Engineering

Griffin — Model-driven Data Quality Service on the Cloud for Both Real-time and Batch Data

At eBay, when people use big data (Hadoop or other streaming systems), measurement of data quality is a significant challenge.

By: Alex Lv
Coding Practices in Engineering

eBay Releases Dynamic Application Security Testing Proxy as Open Source

In an effort to contribute to the open-source community for security, Global Information Security (GIS) at eBay released its DAST Proxy as open-source software.

By: Srinivasa Rao Chirathanagandla
Frontend Engineering in Engineering

Announcing Marko v3: From HTML to HTML-JS

Marko is one of the fastest, lightest, and most powerful HTML templating engines for Node.js and the browser, and we are very pleased to see a healthy and growing community.

By: Patrick Steele-Idem
OSS in Engineering

Announcing Neutrino for Load Balancing and L7 Switching

The eBay PaaS team is pleased to announce the open-sourcing of Neutrino, a software load balancer developed to do L7 switching and load balancing for eBay’s test infrastructure.

By: Blesson Paul