The Bazaar Cathedral: A Look at Open Source at E*TRADE FINANCIAL - Past, Present, and Future

The Bazaar Cathedral: A Look at Open Source at E*TRADE FINANCIAL - Past, Present, and Future
05/23/2007, 10:00 AM - 10:30 AM

Speaker:
Lee Thompson, VP & Chief Technologist, E*TRADE FINANCIAL

- etrade business forcing them into more open source
- first comapny to allow US reatil customers to trade in 6 markets worldwide
- vast majority of servers run Linux
- transaction speed decreased from 8-9 seconds to 4-5 seconds , below 4 about 3 now as they moved from proprietary to all open source. Also save 16 million dollars
- during the last big drop (400 points, feb 27, 2007) they handled traffic at about the same pace while everyone else was slammed with degraded performance
- difficult to scale rapdily when you have to pay for new licenses, allows for flexibility
- key point: etrade has become such a complex environment that testing in the traditional way (scheduling time in the center) became too hard . Instead using Maven and control tier for lifecycle management each etrade developer can have a test environment on their laptop, so they can simulate and fully test new ideas: --> distributed testing, since the environment is fully scalable
- uses Selenium Testrunner as the testing backplane, http://www.openqa.org/selenium/
- roughly 50 million lines of code at etrade
- really focus on constant monitoring at all places in the system
- prepare the systems for failure