Presentation: Airbnb's Great Migration: From Monolith to Service-Oriented

Redesigning your whole engineering architecture is costly and risky, but sometimes it’s worth it! At Airbnb, our Ruby on Rails monolith reached a point where it was difficult to scale alongside our growing engineering team and products. From our ongoing migration from monolithic to service-oriented architecture (SOA), we are already seeing various benefits including improved developer productivity, build and deploy times, site reliability, and latency. 

This talk will provide an overview of trade-offs and motivation for the SOA migration. After discussing our proof of concept steps to break apart our monolith, I’ll discuss our architectural tenets around service building. The talk will then dive deep into lessons learned and best practices developed when undertaking the massive SOA challenge. 

Key Takeaways:

• Identify tradeoffs between monolith and SOA
• Recognize how to apply design principles for building new services
• Understand best practices for caution, comparison, and standardization when migrating architecture
• Learn about Airbnb’s wins so far from the SOA migration