Case Study: Airbnb achieves rapid, automated scaling and reduced operational costs with Amazon Web Services

Airbnb - Customer Case Study

Airbnb, founded in 2008 in San Francisco, is a global community marketplace that connects property owners and travelers to rent unique spaces via web and mobile apps. Rapid growth and service‑administration issues with its original provider prompted the company to migrate nearly all infrastructure to Amazon Web Services so it could scale quickly, manage servers without minimum commitments, and avoid operational bottlenecks.

Airbnb moved core services to AWS—using 200 EC2 instances with Elastic Load Balancing, Amazon EMR for daily data processing, S3 for backups and 10 TB of photos, CloudWatch for monitoring, and Amazon RDS (Multi‑AZ) for its primary MySQL database. The database migration took just 15 minutes of downtime; overall the move reduced administrative overhead (saving at least one operations role), simplified scaling, and positioned Airbnb to handle continued rapid growth.

Airbnb

Nathan Blecharczyk

CTO and Co-founder , Airbnb