eBay-Scale Marketplace Architecture

High-level, partition-first, event-driven microservices layout with read/write separation.

Static + edge compute
CDN / Edge
TLS termination, static assets, bot filtering, geo/AB flags.
HTML/JS/CSSAPI cacheWAFFeature flags
Anycast + GSLB
Global Traffic Mgmt
Latency-based routing, health checks, failover.
Rate limit & authn/z
API Gateway
JWT/session, request shaping, canaries.
Stateless services
Web/App Tier
SSR/SPA backends, BFFs, orchestration.
Auto-scaleBlue/GreenCanary
Microservices
Domain Services
Users
Listings
Offers/Bids
Cart/Checkout
Payments
Shipping
Notifications
Recommendations
Async backbone
Event Bus / Streams
Ordered topics, DLQs, replays; back-pressure friendly.
Kafka/PulsarPub/Sub
Sharded OLTP
TX Stores
Listings, Orders, Users; logical shards & replicas.
Read-mostly
Caches
Item pages, facets, sessions, computed views.
CQRS Read Model
Search Platform
Near-real-time indexing, query federation, ranking.
Images & docs
Object/Blob
Image CDN, media processing, versions.
Metrics/Logs/Traces
Observability
Golden signals, tracing, SLOs.
CI/CD & Governance
SRE / Platform
Service catalog, dependency graph, rollbacks.
Runtime + data
Security & Compliance
Secrets, tokenization, PCI zones.
Legend: Hot path cacheAsync eventShard boundaryRead model
Browse/Search Flow
  1. Browser hits CDN/Edge → static assets + edge caching.
  2. API Gateway → auth, rate limit, canary.
  3. Web/App → orchestrates queries to Domain Services.
  4. Domain Services read via Caches and Search (CQRS read model).
  5. Cache miss → TX Stores for source of truth; results backfill cache.
  6. Telemetry → Observability; Event Bus for async side-effects.
Key Patterns