Scaling Airbnb’s identity graph with a unified knowledge graph infrastructure

Summary

Airbnb migrated its massive identity graph from a third-party graph database vendor to a unified, in-house knowledge graph platform to solve long-tail latency and scaling bottlenecks. Built on JanusGraph with AWS DynamoDB for persistence and OpenSearch for indexing, the new architecture decouples storage operations from graph traversal logic. The migration improved P99 query latency, eliminated routine instance reboots, and supported a tenfold increase in write throughput.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Airbnb built an internal graph platform using JanusGraph decoupled from storage, leveraging AWS DynamoDB for persistence and OpenSearch for indexing.

2. 2

   Engineers resolved Gremlin query bottlenecks in JanusGraph by eliminating unbatched Path steps, parallelizing slice reads, and replacing heavy transactions with DynamoDB conditional writes.

3. 3

   The internal platform enabled shadow-traffic benchmarking against the legacy vendor, achieving a 10x increase in write QPS while reducing long-tail query latencies.