Keeping Up With The Databases

Payments technology is improving fast, and it would be a shame if your customers abandoned you because you didn't pay attention to it.

Five minutes of downtime per year is a reasonable target to aim for if you want to build payments technology.

Last week, Stripe published a blog post in which they claimed their systems had achieved in 2023 99.999 percent uptime, or roughly 5 minutes of downtime throughout the whole year. This is now state-of-the-art in payments. Soon, it will become the norm.

Stripe’s database, built on top of the open-source database engine MongoDB, also helped them achieve zero downtime migrations. I remember vividly having to spend a whole weekend on a project for a top tier retail bank in the UK migrating their data to a new system.

A whole weekend. Can you imagine? Stripe apparently does this without you even noticing.

Draconian availability thresholds and imperceptible database changes are what’s actually innovative in payments technology. And it will turn boring sooner than you expect, but I’m guessing that whatever payment system you’re using is not going to keep up with such a pace.

Forget about…