Uber H3

A fatal mistake made by junior engineers building ride-hailing apps is connecting their API Gateway directly to the Routing Engine. Answer-first: Graphhopper is extremely CPU-intensive. If you ask it to calculate the ETA to all 10,000 drivers currently online in a city, your servers will melt. You must introduce Spatial Indexing (like Uber H3 or Redis GEO) as a high-speed “Pre-filter”. The index quickly finds the 50 closest drivers “as the crow flies” using RAM, and only those 50 are sent to Graphhopper for heavy ETA calculations. ...

Answer-first: Explore the architecture of a real-time Surge Pricing algorithm. Discover how Uber utilizes the H3 spatial index, Kafka, and Flink to calculate dynamic pricing. Why is it that every time it rains, ride-hailing fares double, or even triple? It’s not a human operator manually adjusting the prices behind a desk. Rather, it’s the result of an incredibly sophisticated Stream Processing engine running in the background executing the surge pricing algorithm. ...