On March 25, 2025, Cockroach Labs hosted one of our Use Case Cafés, a lunch and learn that focuses on a key use case. This particular event highlighted the intersection of FinTech and modern payment systems. The event provided valuable insights into the role of CockroachDB in transforming payment systems to meet the needs of today’s fast-paced financial environment. Shannon Dew, Principal Sales Engineer at Cockroach Labs, and Scott Traver, Senior Software Architect at Spreedly, offered their expertise on why modernizing data infrastructure is critical to those handling payments, and how CockroachDB helped Spreedly tackle their journey to the cloud.
You can watch the entire conversation below or read on for the recap and more insights on how CockroachDB supports Spreedly’s payment orchestration platform:
Key priorities for payments systems
Shannon kicked off the event by highlighting several key priorities that are essential for any modern payment system:
Strong security and compliance: Ensuring adherence to standards like SOC 2 and PCI-DSS is crucial for building trust.
Maximum resilience and minimum downtime: Systems must provide continuous availability with zero data loss.
Ability to scale transactions effortlessly: Systems should handle fluctuations in payment volumes without downtime or sharding.
Ensure consistent and correct data everywhere: Accurate and reliable data is non-negotiable in the payments world.
Then Shannon discussed the significant challenges associated with centralized data in traditional databases and introduced CockroachDB as a streamlined, modern solution. CockroachDB’s distributed architecture allows it to handle data more efficiently by strategically placing it where it's needed most. Features like table locality, regional by row tables, and global tables ensure that CockroachDB meets the demands of modern payment systems better than traditional databases.
Spreedly: Modern Payments at Global Scale with CockroachDB
At this point in the presentation, Scott took over to provide his insights. He has a lot of experience with CockroachDB since he led the Spreedly team’s migration several years ago.
Image: A high-level overview of Spreedly's architecture before (left) and after (right) migrating to CockroachDB.
Spreedly is a global payments orchestration platform that handles around 93 million revenue transactions per month. The platform plays a pivotal role in the payment space, enabling businesses to tokenize payment methods and perform seamless payment orchestration. With Spreedly, users can optimize payment flows and expand into new markets without significant business disruption. Given the scale of the business and where Spreedly operates within the business and enterprise payments flow, the Spreedly’s customers need the team to maintain the highest standards of security, performance, and uptime.
To provide more insight into how Spreedly works, Scott dove into their data matrix, which consists of three key bodies of data:
Application data: Core to its operations, including business models and user information.
Payment methods: Secure storage of various payment methods with stringent compliance requirements.
Transactions: Records of all customer activities, demanding high write performance and long-term storage.
Security and compliance are at the heart of Spreedly’s operations, ensuring that customer data is protected and handled in accordance with the highest standards.
Technical Highlights and Implementation
Scott shared that Spreedly’s transition to CockroachDB has been smooth and advantageous:
Migration process: Seamlessly moved from a legacy key-value store to CockroachDB.
Security and compliance benefits: Enhanced security features and meeting data localization requirements of GDPR.
High availability and operability: CockroachDB’s resilient architecture ensures continuous uptime.
Future proofing and flexibility: Features like change data capture, role-level time to live, and integration with observer tools have streamlined Spreedly’s operations.
CockroachDB’s unique capabilities, like follower reads for improved latency and the ability to handle data locality requirements, have had a positive impact on Spreedly’s performance and operational efficiency.
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Learn more about why Spreedly migrated from a NoSQL solution to distributed SQL with CockroachDB: "Full sp(r)eed ahead: an operationally efficient payment infrastructure"
To learn more about how Spreedly leverages CockroachDB for their payments platform, check out Scott Traver’s talk at RoachFest, our annual database conference, below:
See CockroachDB in Action
CockroachDB’s distributed architecture is purpose-built to address the challenges of modern global payment systems. Spreedly’s successful implementation of CockroachDB showcases the benefits of this powerful database solution.
To learn more about future events and how CockroachDB can transform your payment infrastructure, get in touch with our team today.
