When it comes to payment and billing applications, not only is availability crucial, but development teams need to build idempotency into their system to guarantee data correctness.

Cassie McAllister

August 30, 2023

The first idea for a mainframe was developed by a Harvard researcher who took the concept to IBM in the 1930s. After a decade or so of development, the 5 ton machine – that filled an entire room and would cost around $3M today to build – was ready to use in 1943. Industries such as banking, retail, insurance, utilities, healthcare, and government still rely on their mainframes to handle their most sensitive, large-scale transactional data. Mainframes excel when it comes to security and reliability which is why many organizations trust them with their mission-critical workloads.

Cassie McAllister

July 6, 2023

Building a payment processing system is hard and managing people’s money and personal data comes with a lot of risk. The fintech industry is extremely competitive and it’s no longer acceptable to make tradeoffs when building your infrastructure. For most organizations, a payment system is a tier 0 service essential for operations. Downtime is a huge liability. Scaling can be a difficult technical challenge. And what about guaranteeing consistent transactions at scale?

Cassie McAllister

June 8, 2023

Large enterprises with hundreds of developers building thousands of applications and services have a suite of database options to choose from. They also typically have a full team dedicated to maintaining these offerings. The saying “use the best tool for the job” is why they offer so many options, since different workloads have different requirements. Over the past few years, the “best tools” have changed because of the increasing demand on infrastructure generated by business-critical, high-volume, workloads.

Cassie McAllister

May 18, 2023

It’s estimated that there’s over 380 million people across the globe that are active on online dating apps – and that number is only growing. In fact, the market for online dating services is projected to reach 9.2 billion USD by 2025. That’s a lot of swiping!

Cassie McAllister

April 16, 2023

When you tap a hotel keycard on your door handle and hear the satisfying buzz and click of a deadbolt electronically unlocking you’ve likely just used a SALTO Systems product. SALTO is a leader in cloud-based access management technology. They manufacture advanced, flexible, and secure wireless electronic access control technology. SALTO’s products are available in over 40 countries and they have over 40M daily active users accessing over 5M equipped devices. They are leading the movement to replace mechanical keys with digital keys. As part of their strategy for leading this movement they are building flexible infrastructure with CockroachDB.

Cassie McAllister

March 1, 2023

One mistake that should never be made is to assume permissions and identity access are easy. If you plan on just throwing some rows in the database and then making an authorization decision based on the existence (or nonexistence) of a row… then you might not be “secure”. And further, once you are successful, you should also start to consider a scalable and more accurate approach.

Cassie McAllister

January 26, 2023

In 2020, Hard Rock International (HRI) and Seminole Gaming (SGA) launched Hard Rock Digital and tasked that organization with developing an application for sports betting. Hard Rock Digital has the ability to leverage data from HRI and SGA’s combined database of more than 130 million customers and their ~250 land-based venue (across 76 countries); to build the application.

Cassie McAllister

December 21, 2022

As retailers gear up for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, they will not be caught flat footed by the tidal wave of ecommerce sales. Lessons were learned during the unprecedented digital traffic during the pandemic. Retailers are taking new approaches such as shifting to a “Cyber Month” in order to promote deals early to avoid logistical nightmares, and developing lottery systems (like Nugget) to set expectations upfront. Some companies (such as Peloton) are even saying they won’t have a sale at all. Regardless of your strategy, Cyber Monday and associated holiday peak shopping periods will put pressure on your infrastructure. How are you going to handle massive traffic to your ecommerce site and prevent an outage? Will you survive a region failure? Are you confident when giving customers accurate pricing and shipping information? How many transactions can you process in an hour? In this post, we will cover three strategies retailers can employ to exceed customer expectations this holiday shopping season and beyond. (Interestingly, DoorDash just published a blog about how they deal with the challenge of inventory levels changing in real-time. Worth a read.)

Cassie McAllister

November 10, 2022