Founded in 2008, Airbnb is a global community marketplace connecting property owners with travelers looking for unique vacation rentals. Operating in nearly 25,000 cities across 192 countries, Airbnb conducts its business via a website and mobile applications. With headquarters in San Francisco, Airbnb now employs hundreds of staff globally to support its growing community of hosts and travelers.
The Chalange
In its early days, Airbnb had consequential challenges with its original cloud provider, particularly for service administration and scalability. As the user base on the platform began to grow, so did the intricacy related to the management of its infrastructure. The company needed a solution that could seamlessly scale with its rapid growth with reduced operational complexity and minimum downtime.
Initially, Airbnb’s cloud provider did not have the flexibility to handle such demands. The team struggled with the process of provisioning new servers, dealing with minimum usage commitments, and scaling their infrastructure without significant manual intervention. These limitations became a roadblock for Airbnb’s vision of global expansion. They needed a far more flexible, cost-efficient, and scalable cloud solution that could handle ever-growing traffic, data storage, and processing and perform seamlessly for hosts and guests across the world.
Solutions
Airbnb sought to solve this problem by migrating the majority of its cloud operations to Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS provided the flexibility and scalability Airbnb needed to manage its constantly growing infrastructure. By using Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Airbnb was able to spin up new servers as needed without any help from a third party or dealing with usage constraints.
It automatically distributed the incoming traffic between instances on which Elastic Load Balancing was configured so that user requests were handled efficiently, even during peak periods. To process and analyze 50 gigabytes of data a day, Airbnb upgraded to Amazon Elastic MapReduce and Amazon S3 stored 10 terabytes of static files and backups, including images uploaded by users.
Amazon CloudWatch provided Airbnb with a monitoring service for the server resources of its infrastructure through the AWS Management Console or Command Line Tools. It gives an insight into its operations in real time and its automated warnings ensure a smooth operation.
Migrating its core database to Amazon RDS replaced MySQL for all of Airbnb’s needs. This streamlined many of the administrative time-consuming tasks like replication and scaling. Now these tasks can be done through a single API call or by using the AWS Management Console. Airbnb supports high availability and data durability-most important for maintaining ever-growing user interest using Multi-Availability Zone deployment.
The migration was completed in just 15 minutes of downtime, thus minimizing disruption for users. The rapid transition was the key factor for Airbnb as the company wasn’t able to afford extended outages anymore.
Results
Moving to AWS reduced operational complexity, avoided the need for an additional operations role, and set Airbnb up for long-term growth. With responsive customer service and an evolving feature set, AWS has allowed Airbnb to scale the platform continuously without needing yet another provider change.
