Huge
Even though eBay is a huge, world-wide "thing" it just doesn't have the scale, or acumen, or skill to do all this stuff itself. As sure as I'm sitting here, there is as little "off-the shelf" stuff inside eBay as they can possibly manage to have. They start with open-source (read: free) SW. Then they build their own servers, network stuff, OS stack, messaging system, scheduler, DB, and on and on. They're just to good to use (and pay for) any horrible "vendor" stuff in their house. Their ego is equally too huge to admit that someone else may know better.
Also, as sure as I'm sitting here, the outages they have had in the last week did, or should have, cost them as much as they have saved doing it themselves. I'll bet a steak dinner that DB2 and MQ and GPFS, or whatever Oracle sells that is similar but not as good, would not have let this happen. The big banks around the world know this, somebody should tell eBay execs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
