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

Airbnb migrated its identity graph from third-party PaaS to an internally-managed knowledge graph infrastructure built on JanusGraph and DynamoDB.

• •The identity graph contains 7 billion nodes and 11 billion edges, growing at 5 million edges per day
• •Implemented optimizations including custom transaction strategies, parallel query execution, and distributed tracing integration
• •Graph queries typically require 4-8 hops with challenges in managing long-tail latency on high-fanout nodes
• •Supports critical Trust and Safety use cases including fraud detection, suspicious activity identification, and linked account discovery
• •Achieved significant improvements in performance and reliability compared to the vendor solution through storage separation and infrastructure control