Part three of a series on how we provide powerful, automated, and scalable data privacy and security engineering capabilities at Airbnb In Part 1 and Part 2 of our blog series, we gave an overview of…
by Jen Rice and Anna Matlin
Introduction
Airbnb was born in the cloud. In 2008, while many companies were operating data centers, a few clicks on the AWS console brought Airbnb to life. From our first Ruby on Rails app, to our more recent adoption of service-oriented architecture, the ability to instantly spin up compute and storage has enabled our teams to move quickly and meet the growing demands of our business. However, the business value this nimbleness affords can quickly be offset by cloud computing costs, unless the organizational capability to efficiently use these resources is developed.
Background
In the early days of Airbnb, our primary goal was growing the business. Technology teams were focused on growth, and we paid little attention to the cost of running our infrastructure. Several years ago, we noticed AWS monthly cost growth was outpacing revenue growth. We had a problem, but we lacked an in-depth understanding of how teams use AWS resources, and how planned arc