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Two-sided hospitality marketplace

Airbnb Marketplace Platform

Airbnb

Airbnb connects millions of hosts and guests through a sophisticated two-sided marketplace. The platform handles real-time availability calendars, dynamic pricing based on demand, full-text and geospatial search for listings, a multi-step booking flow with payment escrow, and a trust-building review system. Tailored for engineers building two-sided marketplaces with complex search, booking calendars, and trust-and-safety workflows.

Data Flow

CDN
API Gateway
Email Queue
Search Service
Booking Service
Review Service
Listing Search
Core Database
Photo Storage

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Service Breakdown (9 services)

Compute3 services
Search Service
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
Booking Service
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
Review Service
  • •Runs containerized microservices at scale
  • •Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
  • •Supports rolling deployments and health checks
Storage1 service
Photo Storage
  • •Stores objects with eleven 9s of durability
  • •Supports lifecycle policies for cost optimization
  • •Serves as a data lake foundation
Networking2 services
CDN
  • •Caches and delivers content at the edge globally
  • •Reduces latency with geographically distributed PoPs
  • •Handles SSL termination for all inbound traffic
API Gateway
  • •Routes and throttles incoming API requests
  • •Enforces authentication and rate limiting
  • •Provides a unified entry point for microservices
Messaging1 service
Email Queue
  • •Decouples services with reliable message queuing
  • •Supports standard and FIFO delivery modes
  • •Scales automatically with message volume
Data2 services
Listing Search
  • •Powers full-text search and log analytics
  • •Scales horizontally for large datasets
  • •Supports real-time indexing and querying
Core Database
  • •Manages relational databases with automated backups
  • •Supports Multi-AZ for high availability
  • •Handles read replicas for scaling reads

Scaling Strategy

Search scales through OpenSearch with read replicas for geospatial queries across millions of listings. The booking service uses RDS with optimistic locking to prevent double-bookings. SQS decouples transactional emails and notifications from the booking flow. Photo storage and serving scales via S3 + CloudFront with automatic image optimization at the edge.

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