Airbnb on AWS

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.

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.

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. 

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.