Capturing
the excitement and intense bidding action of the real Auction
house!
Company:
eBay
Founded:
September 1995
Industry: Online Auctions
Noteworthy: Approximately 60 Mio. registered users, over $15 billion worth of
goods traded online in 2004
The
World's largest online auction house recently launched a new
service: recreating the atmosphere of a real-life auction floor,
only online. Real-time bidding, absentee bidding, taking part
in actual auctions as they happen - a true merging of the virtual
and real auction experiences!
The
Challenge:
To
capture the excitement and support the intense bidding action
of the real environment. Providing the high-volume, time-critical
messaging infrastructure required, the solution would need to
ensure that all participants in the online auction and the staff
present on the actual auction floor itself always see the latest
bid information and to keep the system running, no matter what!
The
Solution:
eBay's
approach to the problem was to implement a cluster of special
dedicated web server machines to send and receive bid and confirmation
information between the data center and all registered online
auction participants (via Java applets running within the web
browsers of the participants). At the same time, bids are sent
to an Auctioneer applet, being monitored by an official on the
auction floor to alert of bids made, their confirmations being
received in return.
Architecture:
Employed
within the eBay data center itself, iBus//MessageBus provides
the messaging backbone between the clustered Sun Enterprise
450 web servers and Auction Manager machines. Two important
feature aspects of the product were critical to its selection
for this project:
