Evolution of Airbnb’s Microservice Architecture

Airbnb’s microservice architecture went through 3 main stages. This post is based on the tech talk by Jessica Tai.

Monolith (2008 - 2017)

Airbnb began as a simple marketplace for hosts and guests. This is built in a Ruby on Rails application - the monolith.

What’s the challenge?

• Confusing team ownership + unowned code
• Slow deployment

Microservices (2017 - 2020)

Microservice aims to solve those challenges. In the microservice architecture, key services include:

• Data fetching service
• Business logic data service
• Write workflow service
• UI aggregation service
• Each service had one owning team

What’s the challenge?

Hundreds of services and dependencies were difficult for humans to manage.

Micro + macroservices (2020 - present)

This is what Airbnb is working on now. The micro and macroservice hybrid model focuses on the unification of APIs.

Reference: The Human Side of Airbnb’s Microservice Architecture