IndexExecutive SummaryIT InfrastructureHow eBay Manages Its IT InfrastructureWeb BrowserProxy ServerChallenges FacedConclusionSummaryAmong the most popular e-businesses, eBay ranks in one of the leading e-businesses across the world. The eBay community and active users are growing day by day at a rapid pace. Introduction Among the most successful e-commerce sites, eBay is one of the leading web-based businesses in the world. eBay allows business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer sales through its e-commerce site. It allows their customers/users to browse their website called ebay. com and find the things they are looking for to buy or if they want to sell something they can also do so by posting the product for sale online (Ahmed p. 1). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Since eBay's inception in September 1995, this Web-based business has enabled billions of dollars' worth of transactions and currently serves people in many countries, including Australia, France, Ireland, United Kingdom, Canada etc. (Marshak 2003 p. 2) Information system and technology play a vital role in the success of the company. There are no eBay warehouses, inventories or physical stores. This business uses technology and information systems that allow people to sell and buy items online. They generate their revenue from the commissions they receive when products are sold (Chen 2005 p. 77). Information technology infrastructure To realize its full potential, e-business must develop a strong and adequate supporting infrastructure (Galant Jakubczyc and Paprzycki 2002 ). IT infrastructure is the fundamental building block used in entire e-business platforms. It is used to connect parts of the organization with its customers, suppliers and associates. Investments in IT infrastructure are as important as investments in physical infrastructure in machinery, equipment, facilities and land (Weill and Vitale 2001 p. 1). IT infrastructure includes hardware, software, communications resources, management, data centers, physical facilities, and electronically stored data (Weill and Vitale 2001 p. 2). Pierre Omidyar the founder of the eBay application created by eBay. Initially it was just a homegrown auction application. His original application was a two-tier application and was based on the C++ language. The system was limited and does not have the potential to handle increased traffic nor can it handle several business processes other than eBay auctions (Chen 2005 p. 78). Over time eBay has grown and in 2005 eBay includes 200 database servers and 20 search servers. eBay has a grid computing-like architecture that makes eBay more efficient. In addition to the search function, around 50 servers can be used to run everything eBay-related. Servers include application servers, Web servers, and data stores (Julia Layton 2005). How eBay manages its IT infrastructure In this we will analyze how different components including web servers, web clients, databases, application servers interact with each other and how eBay manages them. Web browserThe customer uses the company website via a web browser such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. The user interface is supported by web browsers and customers can make a selection of anything using the eBay website. After the customer submits the request, this system software transfers the data across the network. Proxy Server The proxy server will receive requests from web browsers. The cache of these servers accesses web pages continuously, so every timethat a user wants to retrieve something can retrieve it without actually accessing the website. In contrast, if the customer wants to sell or bid on a certain item, the data needs to be real-time shown to him/her. These types of servers are often located close to customers and on the same network, so with the help of this large amount of resources it is possible to save (Ahmad p. 4). Load Balancing and Web Servers The load balancing component is one of the important parts of the eBay website as it promotes and maintains availability, performance, and scalability. The main purpose of the load balancer is to divide the load (incoming requests) among a set of computers using web servers. Therefore, it improves performance. Furthermore, the load balancer also takes care of the computers and, if one of them goes down, it diverts incoming requests to the other set of computers, thus supporting availability. From the load balancer the requests are then forwarded to the web server. These servers have the ability to perform multithreading. After processing from here the web server sends it to an application server which responds using database services. Application Server and Database The application server receives requests from web servers. Application servers operate in the midst of eBay's trading rules. Business logic and connectivity are implemented through these servers, which ensure how clients and servers will interact. The EJ2EE application server framework is used by eBay as a replacement for the C++ ISAPI used previously. The request finally arrives at the databases and is transformed there into an instruction to modify, add or extract information. Below is the image showing the different components of eBay's IT infrastructure and how they interact with each other (Ahmed p. 3) Challenges eBay Faces and Tips to Overcome As eBay's business evolves, the company faced several issues related to its infrastructure and was forced to expand in different ways. Growing Needs As eBay expanded, the website was no longer sufficient to handle the traffic. It could be based on visits, minutes spent on the site, registered members, articles posted on the platform or the number of transactions made. eBay continually restructures its scalability (Marshak 2003 p. 3). Secondly, the growth of the services that eBay provides and intends to offer in the coming times. eBay has introduced many new services such as eBay Shops and Buy It Now. Since the initial auction model, eBay has expanded its services in new directions (Marshak 2003 p. 3). Seller Management PayPal, being the seller of eBay, has introduced several retail point of sale solutions like PayPal here. If PayPal continues to increase point-of-sale transactions, this may lead to fraudulent activity that ultimately harms eBay through increased fraud and associated risks such as transaction losses. PayPal's business is continually growing but it does not have enough experience and operational history to manage internal controls. Therefore, because of this, customer funds can be mishandled, which can put eBay's business at risk. Therefore, PayPal should improve its internal controls so that it can gain public trust by handling massive and growing customer transactions (Nasdak eBay 2012 p. 34). Scalability eBay in November and December 2000 faced some serious scalability problems because it had designed its data architecture but its hardware was insufficient. At the time they used the Oracle database and the Sun-designed Solaris operating system.