Engineering articles from Airbnb
AI summaries and key learnings from Airbnb engineering teams.
It Wasn’t a Culture Problem: Upleveling Alert Development at Airbnb
The article outlines Airbnb's transformation of its Observability as Code (OaC) alert review process, which significantly reduced development cycles from weeks to minutes. By implementing a system...
Academic Publications & Airbnb Tech: 2025 Year in Review
The article discusses Airbnb's significant advancements in AI and machine learning throughout 2025, particularly in the context of academic conferences such as KDD, CIKM, and EMNLP. It highlights the...
Safeguarding Dynamic Configuration Changes at Scale
The article outlines Airbnb's dynamic configuration platform, Sitar, which enables safe and reliable runtime behavior changes without service interruptions. It emphasizes the importance of a coherent...
My Journey to Airbnb — Anna Sulkina
Anna Sulkina's journey to Airbnb highlights her extensive experience in engineering, particularly in application and cloud infrastructure. She transitioned from hardware diagnostics to software...
Pay As a Local
The article outlines Airbnb's initiative to implement over 20 locally relevant payment methods across various global markets within a year. It details the architectural changes made to their payment...
Load Testing with Impulse at Airbnb
The article describes the Impulse framework developed at Airbnb for conducting comprehensive load testing. It emphasizes the importance of load testing for system reliability and efficiency,...
Understanding and Improving SwiftUI Performance
The article discusses performance optimization strategies for SwiftUI at Airbnb, highlighting the challenges faced when adopting the framework and the solutions implemented to enhance performance....
Achieving High Availability with distributed database on Kubernetes at Airbnb
The article discusses Airbnb's innovative approach to achieving high availability in distributed databases deployed on Kubernetes. It outlines the challenges of managing stateful services in...
Seamless Istio Upgrades at Scale
The article outlines Airbnb's approach to upgrading Istio across a vast infrastructure that includes tens of thousands of pods and multiple Kubernetes clusters. It emphasizes the importance of...
Migrating Airbnb’s JVM Monorepo to Bazel
The article outlines Airbnb's extensive migration of its JVM monorepo from Gradle to Bazel, detailing the motivations behind the switch, such as improved build speed, reliability, and a unified build...
Taming Service-Oriented Architecture Using A Data-Oriented Service Mesh
The article introduces Viaduct, a data-oriented service mesh developed by Airbnb, aimed at enhancing the modularity of microservices-based Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). It contrasts...
Viaduct, Five Years On: Modernizing the Data-Oriented Service Mesh
The article outlines the evolution of Viaduct, a data-oriented service mesh developed by Airbnb, highlighting its transition to an open-source model and the architectural improvements made over five...
Building a Next-Generation Key-Value Store at Airbnb
The article discusses the complete rearchitecture of Airbnb's storage engine, Mussel, transitioning from version 1 to version 2. It highlights the challenges faced with the original architecture,...
From Static Rate Limiting to Adaptive Traffic Management in Airbnb’s Key-Value Store
The article explores the evolution of Airbnb's key-value store, Mussel, from static rate limiting to an adaptive traffic management system designed to handle varying traffic patterns and ensure high...
GraphQL Data Mocking at Scale with LLMs and @generateMock
The article discusses Airbnb's innovative approach to generating and maintaining realistic mock data for GraphQL using a new directive, @generateMock. This directive leverages large language models...