HOW AIRBNB SCALED BY MOVING AWAY FROM A MONOLITH

Summary from the TLDR Web Dev newsletter

Airbnb used to be a Ruby on Rails monolith but it migrated away due to scaling issues. In doing so, it learned four key lessons: invest in shared infrastructure early, simplify service dependencies, centralize data hydration (fetching and transformation), and separate UI logic from the backend logic. This article breaks down what Airbnb did to achieve each point and compares Airbnb’s decisions with those of other large tech companies, like Google, Uber, and DoorDash.