It’s well worth reading this article from Fastcompany.com called: Inside PayPal’s Command Center.
It takes a look at how PayPal operates on a day-to-day basis, the scale of the operation and also talks to Sri Shivananda. He’s the company’s VP of global platform and infrastructure.
Reporter Harry McCracken sees inside the nerve centre of PayPal and talks about how the business operates and deals with the issues that inevitably apply. There’s no doubt that PayPal maintains oversight of its fantastically sophisticated operations here. But they still have a replica of Kirk’s bridge chair from Star Trek. Make of that what you will.
Shivananda calls the room “the pulse of PayPal” and reveals that there are plenty of things that can and do go wrong. He says: “There are bugs in a software update that cause errors. A team is doing maintenance on a load balancer. A database crashes. An ISP can’t take traffic. Any one of those is a chance for an error to occur.”
But by monitoring the various inputs, and weighting the most important, they can react and repair them swiftly. It’s quite fascinating.
