This episode originally aired on Software Engineering Radio.Randy Shoup is the VP of Engineering and Chief Architect at eBay. He was previously the VP of Engineering at WeWork and Stitch Fix, a Director of Engineering at Google Cloud where he worked on App Engine, and a Chief Engineer and Distinguished Architect at eBay in 2004. Topics covered:
eBay’s origins as a single C++ class
The five-year migration to Java services
Sharing a database between the old and new systems
Building a distributed tracing system
Working with bare metal
Why most companies should stick to cloud
Why individual services should own their own data storage
How scale has caused solutions to change
Rejoining a former company
The Accelerate Book
Improving delivery time. 
Related Links:@randyshoupOpenTelemetryLightStepHoneycombAccelerate BookThe MemoValue Stream MappingThe Epic Story of Dropbox’s Exodus from the Amazon Cloud EmpireTranscript:[00:00:00] Jeremy: Today, I'm talking to Randy Shoup, he's the VP of engineering and chief architect at eBay.[00:00:05] Jeremy: He was previously the VP of engineering at WeWork and stitch fix, and he was also a chief engineer and distinguished architect at eBay back in 2004. Randy, welcome back to software engineering radio. This will be your fifth appearance on the show. I'm pretty sure that's a record.[00:00:22] Randy: Thanks, Jeremy, I'm really excited to come back. I always enjoy listening to, and then also contributing to software engineering radio.Back at, Qcon 2007, you spoke with Markus Volter he's he was the founder of SE radio. And you were talking about developing eBay's new search engine at the time.[00:00:42] Jeremy: And kind of looking back, I wonder if you could talk a little bit about how eBay was structured back then, maybe organizationally, and then we can talk a little bit about the, the tech stack and that sort of thing.[00:00:53] Randy: Oh, sure. Okay. Yeah. Um, so eBay started in 1995. I just want to like, you know, orient everybody. Same, same as the web. Same as Amazon, same as a bunch of stuff. So E-bay was actually almost 10 years old when I joined. That seemingly very old first time. Um, so yeah. What was ebay's tech stack like then? So E-bay current has gone through five generations of its infrastructure.It was transitioning between the second and the third when I joined in 2004. Um, so the. Iteration was Pierre Omidyar, the founder three-day weekend three-day labor day weekend in 1995, playing around with this new cool thing called the web. He wasn't intending to build a business. He just was playing around with auctions and wanted to put up a webpage.So he had a Perl backend and every item was a file and it lived on this little 486 tower or whatever you had at the time. Um, so that wasn't scalable and wasn't meant to be. The second generation of eBay's architecture was what we called V2 very, you know, creatively, uh, that was a C++ monolith. Um, an ISAPI DLL with essentially well at its worst, which grew to 3.4 million lines of code in that single DLL and basically in a single class, not just in a single, like repo or a single file, but in a single class.So that was very unpleasant to work in. As you can imagine, um, eBay had about a thousand engineers at the time and they were, you know, as you can imagine, like really stepping on each other's toes and not being able to make much forward progress. So starting in, I want to call it 2002. So two years before I joined, um, they were migrating to the creatively named V3 and V3 architecture was Java, and.you know, not microservices, but like we didn't even have that term, but it wasn't even that it was mini applications. So I'm actually going to take a step back. V2 was a monolith. So like all of eBay's code in that single DLL and like that was buying and selling and search and everything. And then we had two monster databases, a primary and a backup big Oracle machines on some hardware that was bigger, you know, bigger than refrigerators and