Building Resilient Payment Infrastructure

In payments, failures are inevitable. Networks go down, databases reach capacity, and bugs slip into production. The key is designing systems that handle failures gracefully without losing data or double-charging customers.

We use the circuit breaker pattern for all provider integrations. If a mobile money network returns errors above a threshold, the circuit opens and requests are routed to an alternative provider. After a cooldown period, we test the provider again.

Database resilience comes from connection pooling, query timeouts, and read replicas. Our payment engine uses PostgreSQL with PgBouncer for connection pooling and Patroni for automatic failover. Writes go to the primary, reads can use replicas.

Graceful degradation means the system stays up even when parts fail. If the analytics database is down, merchants can still process payments. If the reconciliation service is delayed, transactions are still completed and reconciled later.