The Airtable Engineering blog shares stories, learnings, best practices, and more from our journey to build a modular software toolkit. - Medium
In our last post , we explained why we rewrote Airtable’s in-memory database in Rust. This post is about a specific tradeoff that came with it: keeping schema changes fast. Our legacy JavaScript database could add or remove a column without rewriting any existing rows, so schema changes were very quick. The new database’s row layout is more compact and faster to read, but that comes with a cost:…
By Aria Malkani and Cole Dearmon-Moore As semantic search at Airtable evolved from a concept into a core product feature, the Data Infrastructure team faced the challenge of supporting it at scale. As detailed in our previous post on Building the Embedding System , we had already designed a robust, eventually consistent application layer to handle the embedding lifecycle. But one critical piece…
Airtable’s mission is to democratize software, making the power of software creation accessible to everyone. Our product was originally built for human-scale data — helping individuals and small teams work together to get a job done. As the product has grown, so has the scale of its usage. Today, Airtable is used by more than 500,000 of the world’s largest organizations, including 80% of the…
In this post, we introduce a new storage system that we built in order to cost-efficiently store log data while providing interactive query latency. We’ll cover some motivations, architecture, migration process, and interesting optimizations we made along the way. Archive Data Going into 2024, cost savings was one of the major goals for the storage team. Our AWS MySQL RDS storage footprint was…
In June 2025, Airtable launched Omni, an AI assistant that can build custom apps and extract insights from the vast amount of information stored in an Airtable base, such as customer feedback, marketing campaign data, and product details. Developing an agent that adapts to a dynamic real-world environment and consistently provides high-quality answers required numerous iterations and trial and…
Written by Ameya Khare and Justin Lu At Airtable, we’ve built an agentic framework that powers all of our AI features, including Omni , our conversational app builder, and Field Agents , which are AI-powered fields that can autonomously gather insights and create content within an Airtable base. These agents are capable of reasoning, planning, and orchestrating actions to accomplish complex tasks…
At Airtable, we use Amazon’s Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) to manage Kubernetes control planes so we can focus on deploying our workloads. While Kubernetes has added new features and improved scalability since we adopted it in 2022, fault tolerance remains top of mind, especially as enterprise customers rely on us for mission-critical workflows. Airtable regularly conducts Kubernetes control…
Overview At Airtable, we store our application or “base-scoped” data on a number of sharded MySQL instances in Amazon’s Relational Database Service (RDS). Each Airtable base is associated with a single one of these sharded instances, and as the base and the data in the base changes, we store some append-only data associated with the history of the base. This data powers features such as undo and…
Airtable Interfaces Meet Android: Inside the Architecture “Good Android apps are like onions — they have layers.” — Shrek, if he was an Android Developer, probably. In late 2021, Airtable launched Interfaces in the browser, a feature that allows users to build interactive user interfaces on top of Airtable’s existing data and automation offerings. Having quickly gained popularity amongst our web…
By: Michael Mitchell, Patrick Hayes We previously wrote about how Airtable migrated its codebase from Flow to TypeScript. A few years and several TypeScript versions later, TypeScript is still a critical tool for preventing bugs early on in the development cycle. Back when the previous article was written, we had just over 50 TypeScript projects — mostly mirroring the top-level directory structure…