Building Microservices at 130 Million Requests Per Day

I've spent the last three-plus years building and operating the microservices behind AirAsia Move — the travel super-app that handles flights, hotels, and ancillaries for millions of travelers across Southeast Asia. The system processes over 130 million requests per day, roughly 1,500 requests per second sustained, with spikes well above that during flash sales. I own services on the Manage My Booking platform: flight changes, fare summaries, price-slash features, post-booking ancillaries. A single user action like changing a flight can fan out to eight or nine downstream calls. At this scale,