Articles from Source: Airbnb-Engineering

Airbnb's data teams have made significant advancements to support their expansion into Homes, Experiences, and Services. With the May 2025 release, they faced the challenge of evolving their offline data architecture. To navigate this, they established a flexible framework balancing consistency with decentralized modeling. This approach addresses the unique needs of each product line while maintaining clarity across the organization. Key principles included avoiding hybrid models, ensuring...

🚀 Airbnb has developed the Sitar-agent, a lightweight Kubernetes sidecar that ensures dynamic configuration delivery across thousands of service instances. 🔄 The configuration delivery lifecycle involves creation, hourly snapshot uploads, and real-time updates, ensuring services remain reliable and efficient. 📊 Key design choices include a shift from Ruby to Java for better performance and operational safety. The sidecar model maintains isolation while optimizing server load. #Kubernetes...

Airbnb faced unique forecasting challenges during the pandemic. With traditional models relying on historical data, they turned to geographic recovery signals to create reliable forecasts when local data was scarce. 🌍 By analyzing lead times for bookings across regions, they identified patterns in demand recovery, even as markets reopened at different rates. This innovative approach allowed them to inform predictions based on early signals from similar corridors. 📊 The insights gained during...

🚀 Airbnb is evolving its approach to data management by transitioning to an internal knowledge graph infrastructure. This shift aims to enhance user identity resolution and support Trust and Safety initiatives. 📈 The identity graph has grown significantly, now encompassing 7 billion nodes and 11 billion edges. To address scalability and query complexity challenges, Airbnb has implemented a high-performance, internally managed graph platform. 🔍 Key optimizations during this transition include...

🚀 Exciting news from Airbnb! The release of Viaduct 1.0 marks its transformation into a community-driven data mesh with a stable public API. This GraphQL-based service allows engineers to access and manage data efficiently. Viaduct offers a unified interface for decentralized development, enabling teams to contribute without needing separate servers. Join the conversation and explore how Viaduct can enhance your data integration! #Airbnb #DataMesh #GraphQL #Viaduct #TechInnovation

Airbnb has introduced Skipper, an embedded workflow engine designed to enhance durable execution in complex processes, like insurance claims. Traditional solutions often rely on external orchestration, leading to operational complexities and dependencies. Skipper addresses these issues by allowing workflows to run within existing services, minimizing overhead while maintaining reliability. With a focus on simplicity and clarity, Skipper enables developers to write business logic directly,...

Airbnb has built a fault-tolerant metrics storage system capable of ingesting 50 million samples per second and storing 2.5 petabytes of time series data. Key challenges included organizing tenants, isolating workloads, and ensuring operational reliability. The team adopted techniques like shuffle sharding to enhance fault tolerance and implemented a multi-cluster architecture for improved resilience. This strategic approach aims to maintain high performance while accommodating Airbnb's...

Airbnb is enhancing user privacy while fostering community connections. 🌍✨ Guests can now choose to share their profile information during Experiences, empowering them to control their visibility. If they opt-out, their details remain private, ensuring a secure environment. The distinction between User and Profile helps maintain trust, allowing guests to manage their information effectively. Learn more about Airbnb's privacy-first approach! 🔐 #Airbnb #UserPrivacy #Community #DataControl...

🚀 Exciting developments in metrics migration! A recent article details the transition from StatsD to OpenTelemetry and Prometheus for a high-volume metrics pipeline. The team adopted a dual-write approach, using OpenTelemetry Protocol (OTLP) for internal services while keeping StatsD for legacy applications. This migration improved CPU efficiency and reliability, with significant benefits in data handling. They introduced a centralized aggregation pipeline using vmagent, enhancing scalability...

🚀 Jonathan Woodard transitioned from professional football to tech through Airbnb's Connect Engineering Apprenticeship program. After a career as a defensive end, Jonathan discovered his passion for coding while recovering from an injury. He pursued software development at Nashville Software School, enhancing his skills. Now on the secure development engineering team at Airbnb, he emphasizes teamwork and adaptability in high-pressure environments. Jonathan encourages those from...

Airbnb adapted its forecasting models during the COVID-19 pandemic to better manage unpredictable booking behaviors. 📊✈️ Initially, the models struggled as traditional patterns broke down due to fluctuating lockdowns and shifting guest preferences. In response, Airbnb separated booking volumes from lead-time compositions, creating a new framework called B-DARMA. This allowed for more accurate predictions of future travel trends. Additionally, they discovered that the changes in lead-time...

Airbnb's journey to build an in-house observability platform illustrates key lessons in migration and ownership. Starting with vendor solutions, they faced rising costs and limited insights. To enhance reliability, they migrated to a custom system based on Prometheus, taking control over metrics collection and querying. The migration involved 1,000 services and taught them valuable strategies for managing complexity, focusing on user experience, and improving documentation. These insights can...

🚀 Exciting developments in travel planning! Airbnb has created a destination recommendation model to assist users in the exploration stage. This model addresses challenges like integrating user behaviors and geolocation knowledge to spark inspiration. It predicts destination intent based on users’ historical actions, balancing both active and dormant users. Key applications include autosuggest features and follow-up emails for abandoned searches, enhancing user engagement and boosting...

🚀 Airbnb enhanced its Observability as Code (OaC) alert review process, reducing development cycles from weeks to minutes. By implementing fast feedback loops, they improved alert behavior validation before deployment. This shift led to the migration of 300,000 alerts to Prometheus, ensuring better reliability for teams. Their goal is to provide seamless monitoring for product teams, inheriting best practices without hassle. #Airbnb #DevOps #Observability #TechInnovation #SoftwareDevelopment

In 2025, Airbnb made strides in research, focusing on AI, data science, and machine learning. We participated in key conferences like KDD and CIKM, sharing insights on search, ranking, and personalization. Our researchers presented several papers highlighting innovative techniques, such as rapid assessments for A/B testing and enhanced location retrieval methods. We also expanded our footprint in NLP and measurement science at conferences like EMNLP and COLING, fostering collaborations and...

Airbnb's dynamic configuration platform, Sitar, enhances the way developers manage runtime behavior without service interruptions. It allows for safe, flexible changes, ensuring reliability through validation and controlled rollouts. Key features include a Git-based workflow, staged rollouts, and fast rollbacks, fostering a smoother developer experience. Sitar aims to balance flexibility with safety, making incident response quicker and more efficient. #AirbnbTech #DynamicConfiguration...

🌍 Meet Anna Sulkina, Senior Director of Engineering at Airbnb! With over 20 years in tech, her journey began in Eastern Ukraine amid the Soviet Union's collapse. 🚀 Anna’s passion for technology was sparked by her brother’s early computer experiments. After immigrating to the U.S., she overcame language barriers to thrive in programming. 💡 Her career spans roles from hardware diagnostics to leading teams at Twitter, where she embraced the importance of designing for failure in tech systems. At...

Meet Peter Coles, Airbnb's Head Economist for Policy and Director of Data Science. His journey spans from public school in Milwaukee to earning a PhD at Stanford, and teaching at Harvard. Peter's passion for marketplaces began early, and he's applied his academic insights to real-world data at Airbnb. He has led initiatives to understand short-term rentals and their impact on communities. 🌍📊 From collaborating with academic researchers to innovating within the tech space, Peter emphasizes the...

Airbnb has launched over 20 locally preferred payment methods (LPMs) in just 14 months, enhancing accessibility for guests in over 220 markets. 🌍 These LPMs include digital wallets, online bank transfers, and local payment schemes, making transactions smoother and more inclusive. By focusing on familiar payment options, Airbnb aims to boost bookings and reach new markets. 📈 The initiative also involved a modernization of their payment platform, improving integration speed and reliability. 🔧...

Airbnb has introduced a new GraphQL directive, @generateMock, to streamline the process of creating mock data for testing. This innovation combines GraphQL validation, product context, and LLMs to automate the generation of realistic, type-safe mock data, reducing manual effort for engineers. Key challenges addressed include time-consuming manual mock creation, difficulties in prototyping without server implementation, and keeping mock data in sync with evolving GraphQL queries. This solution...

Airbnb has enhanced its key-value store, Mussel, with advanced traffic management techniques. 🌐 The updated system includes resource-aware rate control, which measures the real cost of requests, and load shedding to prioritize critical traffic during peak times. 🚦 Additionally, hot-key detection helps manage sudden spikes from bots or DDoS attacks, ensuring stability and performance for users. Read more about these improvements and their impact on service reliability. 📈 #AirbnbTech...

🚀 Exciting updates from Airbnb! The team has successfully migrated from Mussel v1 to a rearchitected Mussel v2, enhancing their key-value store for derived data. Mussel v2 addresses issues like operational complexity and performance consistency, now offering real-time streaming and bulk ingestion capabilities. The new architecture utilizes Kubernetes for efficiency, ensuring quick scaling and minimal manual efforts. Airbnb's migration strategy focused on zero data loss and service...

🚀 Exciting news from Airbnb! Viaduct, their data-oriented service mesh, is now open-source! Check it out here: [GitHub link](https://github.com/airbnb/viaduct). Over the past five years, Viaduct has seen significant growth. Traffic has increased eightfold, with over 130 teams contributing to a codebase of 1.5M lines. Key principles like a central schema and hosted business logic remain unchanged, while a new initiative, “Viaduct Modern,” aims to simplify the developer experience and enhance...

🚀 Exciting news from Airbnb! At the Hasura Enterprise GraphQL Conf, the team introduced Viaduct, a data-oriented service mesh aimed at improving modularity in microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Viaduct utilizes GraphQL to manage complex dependencies, moving away from traditional procedure-oriented designs. This new approach facilitates data access and enhances productivity for teams. 🛠️ Learn more about how Viaduct is shaping modern SOA. #Airbnb #GraphQL #ServiceMesh...

🚀 Exciting updates from Airbnb! We have successfully migrated our largest repo, the JVM monorepo, to Bazel after 4.5 years of dedicated work. This transition has significantly improved our build process, achieving a Build CSAT increase from 38% to 68%. Key benefits include: - 3–5x faster local build and test times - 2–3x faster IntelliJ syncs - 2–3x faster deploys to the development environment We chose Bazel for its speed, reliability, and uniform infrastructure. The migration involved...

Airbnb has successfully upgraded Istio 14 times since 2019, managing thousands of pods and VMs across multiple Kubernetes clusters. Their upgrade strategy focuses on zero downtime for users and gradual rollouts, allowing for controlled upgrades and rollbacks without coordinating individual teams. The process involves running two Istiod versions simultaneously, ensuring seamless transitions for workloads. Learn more about their innovative approach in the full article! 🚀🔧 #AirbnbTech #Istio...