Airbnb transitioned from a monolithic Ruby on Rails application, known internally as the 'monorail', to a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Initially suitable for agile development, the monolith became difficult to manage as the company grew. The new architecture consists of data services, derived services, middle-tier services, and presentation services, each with specific functionalities. The migration of reads involved dual reads and response comparison, while writes used a shadow database. Key lessons from the migration include investing in common infrastructure, simplifying service dependencies, and recognizing that moving to services involves cultural as well as technical changes.
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