Case Study: Fast, Simple Open-Source IT - ' Open House '
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Open House

Zappos doesn't make its own shoes, but it does make its own software. The company's 15-person development group—Zappos employs about 1,000 total—has actually built the majority of the systems that run the retailer's business, relying largely on open-source software such as Linux, MySQL, Apache and PERL. That includes the Web site itself, the company's warehouse management system, customer service and merchandising planning tools, and the extranet available to the company's vendors. The main reason: flexibility. "We like the ability to make changes on a daily basis," says Hsieh. "We don't roll out a new version of X, Y or Z every quarter. We do it incrementally."

Staying open source has offered a number of other advantages to the company's development team, according to Field. For starters, he says, he's able to solve coding issues a lot faster than he otherwise might with commercial software. "You can do a Google search or go to a message board and get an answer to a coding problem instantly, rather than waiting for some vendor rep to call," he says. More important, with the company growing at such a rapid clip, Field and his team are able to add both servers and people without having to worry about getting additional licenses. "Keeping a talented team of coders can be expensive," he admits, "but that's something we want to do, no matter what. If you want to make the best use of technology, you need the best people."

Like most retailers, Zappos' heaviest month is December, and the development team uses that end-of-year crunch as an indication of what needs to be done in the year ahead. "Each holiday we hit our peak, and we see how our servers stand up," says Field. Once things taper off, Field's team operates on the assumption that the next December will be double the previous one, and sets about beefing up the company's IT infrastructure. "We build up in the first half of the year," he says. "And we spend the second half riding it out."

Field and his development team stress simplicity above all else when tackling business challenges with IT tools. All departments tie into a central database, but beyond that, says Field, the system has a wide variety of small tools that are specifically tailored for the needs of each department and how it interacts with customers. Say, for example, the company starts selling a new category of product. Field and his team will set up a simple Web report that shows inventory levels and sales levels for each day. That might take just a day to set up. Then, perhaps, someone might want to see a detailed breakdown of sales on a given day. Field's team will create that, most likely linking it to the first tool, so the information will always be a click away. Without too much planning, says Field, this kind of approach has resulted in a very rich feature-set that has grown organically around people's needs. "Each little tool by itself is a fairly small thing," he says, "but hundreds of them together feels like a really powerful application." Because it's partitioned into simple Web-based scripts that don't affect each other, small bugs don't have as large an effect as they otherwise might.

A primary goal of the development team is to keep the Web site running at top speed. To that end, Field stresses a code-before-hardware approach to solving performance problems. "We only throw hardware at a problem as a last resort," he says. Consider a bottleneck in communications. The first step: Find the bottleneck. Second: Use the simplest solution available to fix it. "Maybe it's a code change, maybe it's a system configuration change," says Field. "I've seen relatively simple changes to code that have brought about tenfold performance improvements. You'll rarely see that kind of gain out of a simple hardware purchase," he says.

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