How AirBnB Uses AWS To Scale And Grow Their Business
AirBnB migrated to the AWS cloud to rapidly scale and grow.
When Airbnb launched in 2008 they needed a scalable and cost-effective cloud provider.
Their initial cloud provider wasn’t offering them the flexibility they needed.
Consequently, only a year after launch, they decided to migrate almost all of their IT infrastructure to AWS.
But flexibility wasn’t the only reason they moved to AWS.
Airbnb quickly realized that with AWS they could provision virtually unlimited and highly efficient resources on-demand.
The fact that AWS offered no minimum usage commitments — only pay-per-use pricing — made the cloud provider a very attractive option for their scalability needs.
But how did Airbnb scale with AWS and how was AWS able to provide them with the reliability, availability and cost-effectiveness that Airbnb needed?
The AWS Services Which Airbnb Uses
To date, Airbnb uses a multitude of AWS services, much more than when they started out.
As they started to grow and serve more countries and regions, their dependence on AWS services grew.
Today, Airbnb uses over 200 EC2 instances to run their applications and search servers. These servers are load balanced for scalability using AWS Elastic Load Balancer which automatically distributes traffic across multiple EC2 instances.
Airbnb also uses Amazon Elastic Map Reduce (EMR) to process 50 GBs of data every day.
To store static files such as images of properties which are uploaded by users, Airbnb uses Amazon S3. S3 is also used to regularly back up dozens of terabytes of data.
To monitor its fleet of servers, Airbnb makes use of CloudWatch, a service that allows monitoring of AWS resources at scale. With CloudWatch, Airbnb can supervise all of their 200+ EC2 instances, load balancers and auto-scaling groups.
Another major service Airbnb uses is RDS.
By migrating their entire database to Amazon RDS (Relational Database Service), Airbnb was able to adopt a more managed database service that is easier to scale.
Airbnb was able to migrate their entire origin database systems to RDS with only 15 minutes of downtime.
Naturally, this minimal downtime was critical for their needs to maintain a reputable user experience and not interrupt any user activities.
Airbnb chose RDS because it abstracts away database configurations, and time consuming tasks such as data replication and scaling strategies.
RDS also offers multi-availability zone deployment to remain highly available across geographical regions and automate data replication and durability.
With multi-availability zone deployments, Airbnb’s database systems can withstand multiple data center failures and still operate normally without losing any data.
How Airbnb Scales With AWS
Aside from the many fully managed services which AWS provides, Airbnb said that as they grew they have always been able to rely on AWS for new requested features.
“We’ve seen that Amazon Web Services listens to customers’ needs. If the feature does not exist yet, it probably will in a matter of months.” — Tobi Knaup, Airbnb.
Knaup also mentioned two points which convinced them to migrate to AWS.
First is AWS’s low cost of services. Almost every service on AWS adopts a pay-per-use pricing plan. This allows businesses to scale quickly and maintain costs at a lower point than many other cloud providers, and certainly lower than hosting the same infrastructure on-premise.
Second is the simiplicity of AWS services. Thanks to many services being fully or partially managed by AWS, businesses using the cloud don’t need to spend time and expertise on complex infrastructure configurations. This allows users to get started quickly and build robust applications from the ground up as Airbnb was able to early on.
The Outcome Of Adopting AWS
By adopting the AWS cloud, Airbnb stated that they were able to “save the expense of at least one operations position”[1]. This translates into high costs every month.
The low cost and simiplicity of its services made it a no brainer to switch to the AWS cloud.
Thanks to their adoption of AWS, Airbnb has scaled and grown across the world to offer property rentals in nearly 25,000 cities in 192 countries. [1]
Conclusion
By adopting the AWS cloud, Airbnb has been able to scale massively and offer better and more reliable services to its customers.
With the use AWS services like Amazon RDS for database storage, EC2 for server provisioning, S3 for static file storage, EMR for processing data at scale, and many more, Airbnb facilitates a growing infrastructure for their daily needs.
Being able to scale with AWS has enhanced Airbnb’s customer experience and has aided them in extending their property rental services across many cities and countries.
👋 My name is Uriel Bitton and I’m committed to helping you master Serverless, Cloud Computing and AWS.
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