Airbnb Technology Stack | A - Z

👤 Diwas Poudel 🕒 14 May 2022 📁 TECH

Airbnb Technology Stack in 5 minutes with a detailed description of the technology used. Airbnb is a multinational online marketplace company headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States. The company does not own any real estate and does not host any events. It simply acts as a middleman and receives commissions from each booking. Its primary goal is to provide a service that allows property owners to rent out their spaces to travellers or tourists.

Airbnb is popular because not everyone can afford to stay in a hotel, and finding a hotel in a busy area can be difficult. As a result, travelers nowadays prefer online services such as those provided by Airbnb. It began offering services in 2008 and is now available in over 190 countries.

So, then what technology stack they have used for building these services. Let's go through them one by one in detail.

1 Developer Stack

React JS and BackboneJs

ReactJs and BackboneJs are used for frontend Javascript Libraries.

ReactJs is an open-source Javascript library used for creating web apps with less coding effort, also it is easy to learn. Creating dynamic web pages is easier with ReactJs, It helps to create reusable components which can be reused as a block. It has better performance as well as support SEO.

BackBoneJS is one of the old Javascript Libraries which is in used to date by large companies like Airbnb,Visual.ly.Backbone JS support event-driven communication between views and models which helps to handle code even it gets bigger and bigger, also it can easily be tied with the backend framework.

react-js-and-backbonejs

React Native

React Native is an open-source mobile application framework developed by Facebook. It is used for developing natively rendering mobile applications for iOS and Android. It is also used for building web applications.

Ruby on Rails

Ruby on Rails or Rails is a server-side productive web application framework. Development time of web application is much much faster than Java and C# framework.

ruby-and-rails

MySQL

MySQL is a free and open-source relational database management system. It is open to the important component of the LAMP stack. It runs virtually on the os platforms including Windows, Linux, and UNIX.

mysql

Redis

Redis is an acronym for remote dictionary servers which is basically store data in key-value pairs which are considered to be a database. It is no SQL database. It is used mainly as a database, cache, and message broker. Redis maintained a cache of ticket trends resulting from an elastic search for node applications to render on the web.

redis

Hadoop

Hadoop is an open-source data framework that provides processing and analysis of very huge large amounts of data. Hadoop can work with changing schema(not strict as of RDBMS) which support the various file format. Hadoop is not actually interactive like a general database. It is a batch processing system.

OpenSearch

OpenSearch is a set of technologies that allow search results to be published in a format that is suitable for syndication and aggregation. It is a way to publish the search results in a standard and accessible format for websites and search engines

MapBox

Mapbox is an American provider of custom online maps for websites and applications.

Elastic Search

Elastic Search is a free and open-source distributed search and analytics engine built on Apache Lucene with first released in 2010. and works with all types of data like text, numeric, geospatial, structured as well as unstructured. It is used for business analytics, log analytics, full-text search, security intelligence, etc.

Git and Github

Git is the version control system. You can track your Git version control projects and share them outside of your local machine/server using GitHub.

Amazon RDS

Airbnb moved its main MYSQL database to Amazon Relational Database Service. They have chosen Amazon RDS because it makes the cloud's relational databases easy to configure, operate, and scale.

It simplified tedious and time-consuming administrative tasks that happen in databases like difficulty replication, and scaling to complete the simple tasks as well.

SASS

SASS stands for syntactically awesome style sheets. It is an extension of CSS3. Its important features are nesting rules, variables support, mixins support, extending styles with inheritances, and many more.

Apache Airflow

Apache Airflow is a workflow management framework. Airflow is being used internally at Airbnb to build, monitor, and adjust to automate the movement and transformation of data.

Amazon CloudFront

Amazon CloudFront is a CDN operated by AWS. It offers global content delivery network (CDN) facilities that speed up the delivery of content to the user. Airbnb uses it for the same purpose.

Twilo

Twilio is a cloud communication platform used for customer engagement using a communication app in which the developer just writes few lines of code in the website and application and finally helps the user to make and receive calls, and send and receive a text.

Airbnb uses to bridge the communication gap between guests and maybe hosts as well.

Nexmo

Nexmo is used for Voice and SMS. Nexmo provides API for SMS, Voice, and Phone Verification.

Send Grid - Transactional Email

SendGrid is a cloud-based SMTP provider that enables you to send email without the need for your own email servers. It is a single platform for both transactional and marketing email delivery. The main advantages of Send Grid are deliverability, scalability, and reliability.

Urban Airship

Urban Airship or simply Airship is used for mobile push messaging. It helps to improve customer engagement by doing location-based marketing using push notifications.

Enzyme

The enzyme is a javascript testing tool for REACTJS developed by Airbnb.

2 DevOps and IT Stack

DevOps and IT Stack of Airbnb is as shown below:

Amazon S3, EBS

Airbnb stores all its data on AWS.Amazon Simple Storage Service(Amazon S3)Airbnb uses Amazon S3 for hosting static files.

Amazon EC2

Airbnb uses an elastic load balancer, which distributes incoming traffic automatically between several instances of Amazon EC2. It helps you to scale up and down computing resources on demands based on the traffic on the sites.

Amazon ElastiCache

Amazon Elastic Cache boosts the performance of web applications by allowing you to retrieve data quickly. It helps to speed dynamic web applications.

Docker

Docker is an open-source platform as a service (PAAS) product of software containers where containers help software to run while it is being moved from one environment to another without any problem and glitch.

Nginx

Nginx is an open-source HTTP and reverses proxy server as well as mail proxy server. Some of the features that Nginx has are load balancing, IPV6, Reverse proxy, mail proxy, FastCGI support with caching, Handling static files, index files, and auto-indexing, etc. Nginx is designed to offer high concurrency and low memory usage.

These are the most popular Airbnb DevOps and IT stacks. For more visits click here.

Amazon Route 53 - DNS Management

DNS management software's main purpose is to control DNS server clusters and reduce human error when editing complex and repetitive DNS data. Route53 is one of the managed DNS and is managed by Amazon.Amazon Route 53 is a scalable and highly available cloud DNS web service.Route53 has many advanced features such as load balancing, health checks, routing policies such as geolocation, latency, failure, and multi-value, and so on.

3 Product and Design

Google Font
Hive
Sketch
InVasion

4 Human Resource

Checkr
Cloudpeeps
Workday

5 Analytics and Data Science

Amazon EMR

Airbnb has more than 50 Gigabytes of daily data to easily process and analyze this data Airbnb uses Amazon Elastic MapReduce(Amazon EMR).

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is the Funnel Analysis Tool. It helps you identify where people are dropping out so you can do analysis and raise your conversion rate.

Amazon CloudWatch

To monitor all the server resources, Airbnb uses Cloud Watch. Cloud Watch is a monitoring and observability service by Amazon.

Presto, Druid,Airpal - Big Data Tool

Presto is a Facebook-created open-source distributed SQL query engine for running analytics queries against large data sets. It is compatible with both relational and non-relational databases.

Druid is an open-source analytics data store designed for event data business intelligence (OLAP) queries. Druid provides data with low latency (in real-time).

Airbnb created Airpal. It is a web-based query execution tool that uses Presto to facilitate data analysis.