Case Study: Booking.com orchestrates data and AI at scale with Astro

Booking.com runs 1000s of DAGs and 100 AI pipelines with Astronomer

Booking.com, one of the world's largest online travel platforms, faced a significant challenge in orchestrating its massive data and AI migration to the cloud. Their legacy on-premises system, built on Hadoop and Oozie, could not scale to meet the demands of real-time data and AI-driven experiences. Early attempts to self-manage Apache Airflow proved unreliable and unscalable, creating a major bottleneck for their mission-critical data platform, the Booking Data Exchange (BDX), which directly impacts bookings and payments. To solve this, they partnered with vendor Astronomer.

Astronomer provided its managed Airflow platform, Astro, as the orchestration backbone for Booking.com's modern data platform on AWS. With support from Astronomer's Center of Excellence, Booking.com successfully migrated thousands of data pipelines (DAGs) in a matter of months without disrupting business. The solution provided near-zero scheduler downtime, scaled to billions of daily predictions, and now powers hundreds of the company's AI data pipelines. This allows dozens of engineering teams to build on a shared, reliable platform, enabling customer-facing AI tools like the AI Trip Planner and Smart Messenger.

Booking.com