Viaduct, Five Years On: Modernizing the Data-Oriented Service Mesh

Airbnb's Viaduct data-oriented service mesh celebrates five years with an open-source release and a major architectural overhaul called "Viaduct Modern".

• •Traffic has grown 8x, active teams doubled to 130+, and the hosted codebase tripled to 1.5M lines while keeping operational overhead constant
• •The new Tenant API simplifies the programming model from many overlapping mechanisms down to just two: node resolvers and field resolvers
• •A formal "tenant module" concept enforces strong abstraction boundaries, with inter-module composition done via GraphQL fragments rather than direct code dependencies
• •The engine and tenant API are now separated by a strong boundary: the engine uses a dynamically-typed representation internally, while the tenant API exposes statically-typed Kotlin classes
• •The framework overhaul aims to enable faster engine improvements (latency, throughput, reliability) without requiring changes to application code