Full sp(r)eed ahead: an operationally efficient payment infrastructure

Paying the price

In general, there are a lot of complications associated with securing financial data — from adhering to compliance regulations, to ensuring you never lose data, to guaranteeing consistent transactions, and much more. If you don’t have the right infrastructure and security in place, it can become an operational nightmare.

Spreedly originally built their platform on a NoSQL key-value data store. This database didn't have relationships, so they had the secondary index and secondary systems split from the primary application database. This setup became a struggle to maintain and wasn’t performant; they needed to consolidate their data storage.

Additionally, Spreedly wanted to move from on-premises datacenters to the public cloud. Making this transition with their NoSQL database setup would be difficult (considering all the separate systems) and they wanted a solution that could scale with them in the future.

They had a few requirements for a new database:

• High availability and enterprise security to protect customer data

• Ability to scale out to multiple regions and deliver low latency for a global audience

• Built for transactional workloads and guarantees data correctness

• Backed by a company with progressive mindset leaning into cloud-native approach

After researching for a new solution, they came across CockroachDB — a cloud-native, distributed SQL database designed to handle transactional workloads generated by global applications. CockroachDB met all of their requirements for a modern database solution and they felt confident in its ability to grow with them in the future.

Spreedly is now in production with CockroachDB which they are self-hosting on AWS across multiple availability zones. They are storing a lot of transactional data in CockroachDB: customer requests from different providers / gateways / fraud vendors / network tokenization providers, configuration objects used to operate the platform, customer connectivity to third parties and gateways, and so on.

Here’s a high-level view of what their architecture looked like before and after the migration.

As you can see from the diagram, they were able to depreciate several systems (3 custom code bases, 2 databases, 3 protocols) and consolidate on CockroachDB. Now they have a cloud-first data storage approach which will allow them to expand to multiple cloud regions in the future. With a multi-region setup, they will be able to provide low-latency access (by leveraging data localization capabilities) for their customers spanning geographies.

Throughout the migration process, they remarked that they were impressed with the high level of support from the Cockroach Labs team and the thorough documentation. Scott Travers, an engineer who manages CockroachDB, said that, “in terms of setting up CockroachDB and operating it, it’s really just been a piece of cake.”

While operations have been quite smooth, Scott mentioned that his team spent some time training colleagues on CockroachDB’s more modern features. It’s important that the app engineers and R&D teams understand the intricacies of an advanced system and the new capabilities it provides.

What’s next

Now that they’ve been able to retire several legacy systems, their operations teams are much more efficient. In terms of where the business is headed in the future, for Spreedly the “customers drive the opportunity.” Where there’s customer demand, Spreedly and CockroachDB will follow!