Airbnb Technology Team

Sep 22, 2021 · Backend Development

Design and Implementation of Himeji: A Zanzibar‑Based Centralized Authorization System at Airbnb

Airbnb replaced duplicated, latency‑prone authorization checks in its new service‑oriented architecture by moving them into data services and building Himeji, a Zanzibar‑inspired centralized permission store that uses triple‑based policies, configurable unions, sharded caching, and Aurora backing to deliver sub‑10 ms latency for millions of checks per second with 99.999 % availability.