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Airbnb on AWS

Founded in 2008, San Francisco-based Airbnb is a community marketplace with over 7 million accommodations and more than 40,000 unique Experiences for customers to book on the company’s website or through its iOS and Android applications.

CUSTOMER STORIES

2022

Build With Me—Airbnb & Rong Hu, Senior Software Engineer

See how Rong Hu, Senior Software Engineer at Airbnb, discovered her passion in programming during her elementary school days and how her interests in math and puzzle solving led her to a career in engineering. Rong also discusses the importance of Amazon OpenSearch Service and Amazon Kinesis and how they've helped Airbnb scale it's application logging pipelines both cost effectively and reliably.

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2022

Airbnb Optimizes Usage and Costs by Using Savings Plans and Actionable Cost Data on AWS

Airbnb has grown rapidly since its 2008 founding, which has necessitated the equally swift expansion of its technical capabilities. The company has worked to grow sustainably and improve operational efficiency. To help it achieve its goals, Airbnb looked to Amazon Web Services (AWS), its cloud provider, for data and infrastructure solutions. Using support from AWS and multiple AWS services, Airbnb developed strategies to manage capacity, optimize storage and compute capacity, and build a custom cost and usage data tool. The solutions help Airbnb reduce costs, deliver actionable business metrics, and pursue data-informed efficiency projects across its teams.

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2022

Airbnb Uses Amazon EFS to Scale CI/CD Pipeline for Expanding Online Marketplace

Airbnb supports hundreds of critical services on its platform, making it essential to maintain a reliable source control infrastructure. However, source control infrastructure had become an operational headache due to scaling issues. Airbnb sought a solution it could use to re-architect the source code infrastructure with a simpler storage layer. The system needed to update in seconds and read traffic needed to scale. Airbnb turned to Amazon Web Services (AWS) to help achieve its goals. 

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2016

Airbnb Grows with Flexibility and Responsiveness Using AWS

A year after Airbnb launched, the company decided to migrate nearly all of its cloud computing functions to Amazon Web Services (AWS) because of service administration challenges experienced with its original provider. Nathan Blecharczyk, Co-founder & CTO of Airbnb says, “Initially, the appeal of AWS was the ease of managing and customizing the stack. It was great to be able to ramp up more servers without having to contact anyone and without having minimum usage commitments. As our company continued to grow, so did our reliance on the AWS cloud and now, we’ve adopted almost all of the features AWS provides. AWS is the easy answer for any Internet business that wants to scale to the next level.”

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AWS re:Invent 2018

A Chronicle of Airbnb Architecture Evolution

Airbnb is going through tremendous growth internationally, evolving from a home sharing company to a global travel community with many product offerings. The growth driven by the business, increase in traffic, and aggressive hiring created a new challenge for the Production Infrastructure Team. The team has grown from a small team of 10 to a production platform organization with 100 engineers that builds foundational services that support homes, experiences, luxury, and China. In this session, Airbnb engineers chronicle the company's architectural evolution that aligns with organizational growth strategy, and review how they overcame architectural challenges using AWS technologies.

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ARCHITECTURE

2022

This is My Architecture: Securing Multi-Tenant Kubernetes Clusters at Scale

Airbnb enables a multi-tenant, fine-grained Security Access Control to their Kubernetes Control Plane architecture. To locks down the security controls, Airbnb runs Kubernetes on Amazon EC2 and leverages AWS Security Token Service (STS) tokens to inject the IAM role into the cluster. Airbnb further refines the access controls with the IAM role to the PODs for least privileged access.

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2017

Troubleshooting and Performance Testing with an Amazon RDS Replay Machine

Xinyao Hu, engineering manager at Airbnb, discusses the Amazon RDS Replay machine built by his team. The infrastructure allows the team to replay actual transactions sent to almost 100 different databases. Airbnb uses this system for disaster recovery, load testing, and advanced analytics in Hive at massive scale.

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Learn how travel & hospitality brands enhance the customer experience and increase operational efficiency with AWS.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

2017
RE:INVENT

Airbnb Migrates to Amazon Aurora
Airbnb has served more than 200,000,000 customers across 191 countries and is one of the largest database consumers on AWS. The company has heavily adopted MySQL and recently completed a migration to Amazon Aurora. In this session, Airbnb product managers share about design considerations for operating at Airbnb scale, advice for other startups, and thoughts on why they decided to run on Aurora.
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2016
AWS BLOG

Airbnb – Reinventing the Hospitality Industry on AWS
Airbnb is a classic story of how a few people with a great idea can disrupt an entire industry. Launched in 2008, over 80 million guests have stayed on Airbnb in over 2 million homes in over 190 countries. They recently opened 4,000 homes in Cuba to travelers around the globe. The company was also an early adopter of AWS. In this guest post, Airbnb Engineering Manager Kevin Rice talks about how AWS was an important part of the company’s startup days, and how it stays that way today.
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