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Open Airbnb (Marketplace) →Open Instagram Feed →

Airbnb (Marketplace) vs Instagram Feed

Airbnb (Marketplace)

Airbnb (Marketplace)

Geo-search, booking, payments, and reviews. The canonical two-sided marketplace architecture.

Components (10)

  • Guest / Host
  • API Gateway
  • Search Service
  • Listing Service
  • Booking Service
  • Payments Service
  • Messaging Service
  • Kafka
  • Postgres
  • S3 + CDN

Headline numbers

  • Search QPS~5,800/sec avg, ~30K peak
  • Booking QPS~60/sec avg, ~300 peak
  • Photo storage~5 PB
Instagram Feed

Instagram Feed

Fan-out on write vs read, ranking, CDN.

Components (10)

  • Mobile Client
  • CDN
  • API Gateway
  • Feed Service
  • Post Service
  • Kafka
  • Fan-out Worker
  • Redis
  • Postgres
  • S3

Headline numbers

  • Posts / sec (avg)~3,000/sec
  • Feed read QPS~58,000/sec
  • Fan-out writes / sec~600,000/sec

Key differences

Only in Airbnb (Marketplace)
  • Search Service
In both
  • Client
  • Api Gateway
  • Service
  • Queue
  • Database
  • Storage
Only in Instagram Feed
  • CDN
  • Redis

Flow shape

Airbnb (Marketplace) flows
  • Search + book a listing8 steps
  • Two guests try to book the same dates simultaneously5 steps
  • ⚠ Brand-new listing not yet searchable5 steps
Instagram Feed flows
  • Post a photo (fan-out on write)7 steps
  • Open feed (precomputed timeline)5 steps
  • ⚠ Fan-out Worker is down7 steps
  • ⚠ Timeline cache flushed (Redis restart)4 steps