Breaking the Linear Relationship Between Growth and Cost

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eBay manages approximately 90 million active users in 32 countries speaking 7 languages, 24/7/365. To date, our marketplace has over a billion photos and over 210 million active listings. Every day on average there are 8 million new listings, over 90 billion database calls, 6 billion URL hits, 4 billion committed transactions, and 8 Petabytes of storage processing 50TeraBytes of new incremental data.

Our company had a 98% correlation between site infrastructure cost and business growth, meaning as listings increased we had a linear increase in overall site operating costs. The four-year innovation strategy that coupled technology refresh with overall data center efficiency broke this trend by absorbing a doubling of our overall infrastructure capacity/capability while keeping the operating costs nearly flat year-over-year in the world's largest on-line marketplace.