Uber

Global Ride-Sharing Platform

150M+

Active Users

70+

Countries

15M+

Daily Rides

$31B

Annual Revenue

Company Overview

Uber revolutionized urban transportation by connecting riders with drivers through a mobile app. Founded in 2009, Uber has grown to serve over 150 million users across 70+ countries, completing billions of rides.

The company's technical infrastructure handles real-time matching, dynamic pricing, and global operations at unprecedented scale, making it one of the most complex distributed systems in the world.

Business Model

Commission-based revenue from each ride
Dynamic pricing based on demand and supply
Multi-sided marketplace connecting riders and drivers
Diversified services (Uber Eats, Uber Freight, etc.)

Context

• Global ride-sharing platform serving 70+ countries
• Real-time matching system with geospatial processing
• Multi-sided marketplace connecting riders and drivers

Patterns & Typical Choices

• API Gateway: rate-limits, auth, request shaping (e.g., Zuul/Envoy)

• Storage: metadata (KV/Doc), sessions (in-memory), search (inverted index), analytics (data lake)

• Messaging: queues vs streams; idempotency; outbox/CDC to avoid dual-writes

• Caching: edge CDN + service caches; stampede protection (locks, jittered TTLs)

• Observability: trace IDs across hops; RED/USE metrics with SLOs

Related Case Studies

Netflix

Spotify

Amazon