Building 99.99% Availability for a Fast-Growing Payment Gateway
Implementing robust high availability architecture with comprehensive disaster recovery and real-time monitoring for a critical financial platform
Overview
A rapidly growing fintech company based in Mumbai providing payment gateway services to over 12,000 merchants across India and the Middle East. With transaction volumes growing 42% year-over-year and processing approximately ₹220 crores monthly, the platform handles critical financial operations requiring maximum reliability.
After experiencing several costly outages impacting merchant operations and consumer trust, the company needed to significantly enhance their infrastructure reliability while meeting stringent RBI and PCI compliance requirements.
Business Challenges
System Reliability Issues
Recurring system outages causing up to 95 minutes of downtime monthly
Single points of failure in critical transaction processing components
Inconsistent performance during peak shopping events with 3x normal traffic
Inadequate Disaster Recovery
Manual backup processes with inconsistent execution and verification
Recovery time objectives (RTO) exceeding 6 hours, violating SLAs
Lack of documented DR procedures and regular testing protocols
Limited Visibility
Reactive monitoring resulting in customer-reported issues
Fragmented logging across different system components
No centralized alerting system for critical performance thresholds
Our Solution
We designed and implemented a comprehensive resilience strategy ensuring maximum availability while providing complete system visibility.
Assessment & Strategy
We conducted a thorough analysis of the existing infrastructure, identifying critical vulnerabilities and creating a resilience roadmap.
Availability Analysis
Performed failure mode analysis of entire transaction processing flow
Identified single points of failure and service dependencies
Created architecture diagram with resilience scoring for each component
Recovery Planning
Benchmarked current RTO/RPO against industry standards and SLAs
Evaluated current backup procedures and restoration success rates
Designed multi-tier recovery strategy with automated failover
Monitoring Framework Design
Mapped critical business functions to system components
Developed comprehensive KPI framework for system health
Created observability architecture with end-to-end transaction visibility
Business Impact & Results
System Uptime
•Reduced monthly downtime from 95 minutes to under 4.3 minutes
•Eliminated planned maintenance windows
•Successfully handled festival season with 4.2x normal transaction volume
Disaster Recovery
•Reduced RTO from 6+ hours to under 30 minutes
•Successfully completed 5 unannounced DR drills with 100% recovery
•Achieved RPO of less than 5 minutes for all critical data
Monitoring Effectiveness
•Proactive detection of 92% of potential issues before customer impact
•Mean time to detection reduced from 24 minutes to 4.5 minutes
•End-to-end transaction visibility with sub-second tracing resolution
Business Impact
•Captured ₹1.8 crores in transactions that would have been lost to downtime
•Secured three enterprise clients specifically citing reliability improvements
•Achieved top-tier status with key banking partners based on reliability metrics
"VegaStack turned our infrastructure reliability into a strategic advantage, enabling us to pursue enterprise clients with five-nines reliability. Their proactive monitoring solutions help address issues before impacting merchants."
Key Takeaways
Active-Active Architecture
Implementing active-active configuration across availability zones eliminated single points of failure while improving performance.
Automated Recovery Testing
Regular automated DR testing uncovered subtle failure scenarios that could have caused recovery failures during actual incidents.
Business-Aligned Monitoring
Tying technical metrics to business outcomes provided clearer prioritization during incident response.
Culture of Resilience
Moving beyond technical solutions to establish team processes and resilience culture ensured sustained improvements.
Conclusion
This engagement transformed the client's infrastructure from a business liability into a strategic asset supporting their rapid growth. By implementing a comprehensive approach to high availability, disaster recovery, and monitoring, we helped them achieve the reliability standards expected in financial services while maintaining the agility of a fintech innovator.
Looking ahead, the monitoring framework and resilience processes provide a foundation for continued scaling as the company expands across Southeast Asia. With transaction volumes expected to double in the next 18 months, the new architecture provides confidence that the platform can scale reliably while maintaining their hard-won reputation for dependability.
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