When a flash sale goes live or a major sporting event starts, payment systems face a huge challenge. Thousands of transactions have to be processed at the same time, without slowing down or failing.
Concurrency is One of the Biggest Challenges
Rather than processing one payment after another, payment systems have to validate and then authorize thousands of transactions, all at the same time. During major product launches, retailers often see huge spikes in traffic.
When major gigs are announced, ticketing websites experience enormous influxes of sales, typically within 60 seconds or less. UK delivery apps like JUST Eat also experience spikes in payments at mealtimes, and rely on payment systems that can handle volumes like this, without interruption.
The same trends apply in the online slots UK market. As sites tend to offer hundreds of slots that range from Mega Coins 2 to Red Hot Catch, payments are deposited around the clock, and large volumes of transactions take place every second.
To deal with the associated challenges, many brands are trying to create new tech stacks. An example would be Shopify, where the tech stack includes Stripe, Cloudflare, AWS, and Snowflake.
Adobe Commerce uses Adyen, Redis, Kubernetes, and Datadog. During times of high traffic, some sites may use payment gateways like Worldpay in combination with cloud infrastructure, like Google Cloud. Message queues like RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka, alongside monitoring tech like New Relic, can also be good for managing large volumes of sales.
Platforms that accept thousands of payments often create multiple gateways, which include API gateways to route traffic and containers for automatic scaling. Tech stacks can include session management to try and make sure that people are not staying on the page too long or that they are being given the chance to check out before being forced off the page.
Replacing Legacy Infrastructure
Traditional payment systems typically rely on things like monolithic software. Every function is tied together in one operation. While this is good for lower transaction volumes, the architecture is impossible to scale.
Modern payment platforms use microservices instead, which break down payment processing into several more individualized components. One service may handle elements like customer authentication, and others may handle account updates. This is explained by US company Diebold Nixdorf.
As each one can scale independently, businesses can accept more payments without having to tackle issues like bottlenecks. Cloud infrastructure has helped to accelerate this shift, allowing payment providers to add resources during heavy demand.
As consumers expect transactions to go through faster, smoother checkout experiences and payment infrastructure will continue to be overhauled. Cloud-native architectures in combination with AI-fraud detection and scalable microservices are helping businesses to process millions of transactions without faltering, even during times of peak demand.
Although modifying a tech stack is complex, as the individual elements have to link together seamlessly to generate the desired result, it is clear that this is the future of online payments. As businesses explore new tech stack combinations and as new software is released, we can expect to see simpler stacks but with more complex microservices.
