After a long time of silence, we are back with news: we have moved our back end to Azure cloud
I know this may not look like exciting and it is not bringing any visible benefit to the user, but this change it is in fact enabling future features like suggestion of best deals per city.
Below you have a summary of the changes:
- Moved our crawler from a physical instance to an Azure virtual machine
- Moved our MongoDB from a physical instance to an Azure virtual machine (future steps may be migrating it to CosmosDB, but just not yet)
- Redesign some collections on the database to flatten the structure (this is key for future features like “Best rooms”).
- Optimize indexes to make sure crawler writes does not take forever.
- Vertically scale database dividing some collections into archived documents and current documents (this also improves indexing and writing speed).
- Created a new algorithm to figure out if a room was really occupied or reserved to be used by the own host (note Airbnb does not provide this information so we have to guess if the room is really reserved by somebody or it is temporally taken out by the host).
- Lots of small changes and bug fixtures to make sure nothing is broken, or to fix something that was broken.
There is still more work to do but the objective is to get the “Best Rooms” feature ready for you!