Airbnb on 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.”

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.