Experimentation in a Ridesharing Marketplace

Part 1 of 3: Interference Across a Network

Technology companies strive to make data-driven product decisions — and Lyft is no exception. Because of that, online experimentation, or A/B testing, has…

Matchmaking in Lyft Line — Part 1

Lyft Line is a ridesharing product that automatically pairs riders together with overlapping routes, allowing us to provide a cheaper ride for all passengers. The more overlap two routes have, the larger the discount we can provide. But what makes a good Lyft Line…

Announcing Envoy: C++ L7 proxy and communication bus

Experimentation in a ridesharing marketplace

Part 2 of 3: Simulating a ridesharing marketplace

In this post, we’ll talk about how Lyft’s simulation framework works, and how simulation in general can be an indispensable tool for a data…

Scoping AWS IAM roles to Docker containers

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has a really great security feature, called IAM roles, that can be used with EC2 as instance profiles. When you launch an EC2 instance with an instance profile, the IAM role credentials are available to the instance through the…

Freezing Time

- “Time doesn’t exist, clocks exist”

There are many features at Lyft where it’s critical to have an accurate (and trustworthy) time source. This apparently trivial requirement presents a few challenges when the timestamp comes from a device we can’t…