My colleague Randy Shoup has organized an architect summit at eBay. Randy has invited the who’s who of architects who are currently driving eCommerce and Cloud platforms.  The candid conversation on what has worked for them and what hasn’t quite (don’t we all have one such list?) was phenomenal. As well, I was struck by how the various eCommerce operations can produce quite a different footprint at the infrastructure level. Take, for instance, the ratio of data read vs. write. You will find that there are quite a few operating points, depending on whether you’re looking at fixed-price catalogue business vs. auctions vs. photo websites.

I especially liked the sessions on how technology can best assist functional partitioning and sharding (when to push complexity deep into the infrastructure or to invoke the e2e argument instead) and the discussions on consistency in large-scale distributed systems (intra-partition consistency, probabilistic consistency, …).