Case Study: KAYAK achieves sub-3ms search performance and cost-effective global scale with Aerospike

How to Travel Smart Replacing Cache

KAYAK, a top‑ten travel search engine operating in 34 countries and handling millions of visitors and over a billion queries a year, faced extreme read/write loads from real‑time pricing and inventory lookups. Frequent multi‑device searches and aggressive third‑party lookups made low latency, high reliability and affordable caching essential to keep pages fast and avoid costly infrastructure limits.

KAYAK replaced ehcache and memcache with Aerospike running on bare‑metal servers with RAM and direct‑attached SSDs, synchronized across US and European data centers with Aerospike XDR. The change delivered multi‑key gets in under 3 ms, easy deployment, very low jitter and no downtime, yielding reliable, cost‑effective scale and faster, more relevant offers for users.

KAYAK

Ko Baryiames

SVP Technology