BUILDING A NEXT-GENERATION KEY-VALUE STORE AT AIRBNB

Summary from the TLDR Dev newsletter

Airbnb rearchitected Mussel, its core key-value store for derived data, to address limitations of its previous version (v1). Mussel v1 suffered from operational complexity, scaling issues due to static partitioning, limited consistency controls, and opaque costs. The re-architecture to Mussel v2 introduced a NewSQL backend with a Kubernetes-native control plane, dynamic range sharding, and an event-driven write model. Zero downtime was needed for the migration.