TL;DR Summary — We accidentally submitted an incorrect change to the templating of our infrastructure provisioning system. This deleted all of the microservices responsible for serving skyscanner.net and data to our mobile app from the underlying infrastructure across the entire globe, causing a four-hour outage. …

Introduction Skyscanner engineering squads deploy thousands of production changes every day that interact with hundreds of services hosted on AWS. In total, we have over 6,000 CloudFormation stacks across 60 different AWS accounts! …

Hi there 👋, my name is Jean Rauwers. I am from Brazil and recently have joined Skyscanner as a Software Engineer 2. I wanted to share a bit about my experience over the past few months, including the hiring and onboarding processes here at Skyscanner. HIRING PROCESS My hiring process was very…

How can you create a set of shared beliefs that steers everyone in the right direction? In early April 2018, we launched Skyscanner’s first set of guiding principles for engineering, internally known as ‘Our Engineering Principles’. Today, this allows all of our engineers to follow a shared set of beliefs…

What has been your journey in tech so far? Initially, I had zero intention of becoming a software developer. I was a history and media studies major who happened to code as a hobby, making birthday cards for my friends in Flash with emo music and ActionScript and making websites on Tripod. It was in a media studies lab…

Introduction At Skyscanner, we take the career aspirations of our teams seriously, which is why we have spent a ton of time building our two distinct engineering paths; individual contributor (IC) or manager. Advancing your career as an IC is seen as a linear progression; going from Senior Software Engineer to…

Skyscanner’s systems are anything but small-scale. With millions of travellers using our site and app every month, we handle dizzying volumes of requests across a microservice architecture that, itself, is pretty huge. All-in, there are several hundred microservices and microsites (webapps that support a specific portion of the site), supported…

Introduction Skyscanner’s Continuous Integration and Delivery (CI/CD) pipeline is built to support tens of thousands of deployments per day. The frequency of production deployments cannot come at the expense of security. In fact, security processes need to be integrated within the CI/CD pipeline. …

This post describes how we improved the query performance for our OpenTSDB cluster and enabled queries that previously were impossible by reducing the resolution of historic data. Skyscanner’s focus is to drive every decision in Skyscanner by complete, timely and accurate data. As part of this, we’re operating a large…