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- Hacker News
- American Express tech is some of the worst in the world among big companies. All of the value in the company is just in the branding. They put some work into the mobile app and the website, but other than that, its a facade.by llmslave
- 403 Forbidden
Because of the title I was expecting to read about doing payments with a distributed network, like a terrorist cell network, or something like Hawala. Not (as I infer from other comments) Amex using multiple independent systems.
by inigyou - This matching up with sliced data, either sliced by recipient, or sliced by sender, so it makes sense to have primary state with cool backups. Particularly if the state is race-tolerant.
As long as event orderings are unimportant, or self resolvable this works really well.
e.g. if Events A,B arrive, but A+B => C and B+A => C, then as long as you durably record A, B, the end state is the same.
I'm not sure why "reroute" is a message instead of a response, I would expect it to be a failure response pruning the control flow. With the GTR being "default retry".
There's a lot of learned experience in that doc. Reading between the lines, both the logging and configuration systems have caused global outages (or near misses). Nifty to read.
This style of architecture fits with a "no global changes" and "never lose it all" approach to fault tolerance, accepting that there will be visits from "Mr. Cock-up" [1].
Very nice writeup.
by jpollock - microservices / clusters / zones - really all of these are other "cell-based" architectures as well. there is absolutely no written rule that a microservice was just an API or a singular service, it basically can be a independent instance that is testable/usable/gives value on itself.
that said: still a nice write up, learning about some of the architectural choices that AMEX makes is definitely insightful (and relavent/useful to what i am working on right now as well!)
by mkhalil - All i can see is a giant single point of failure called the Global Transaction Router.by nightshift1
- Some of it sounds like it reinvented Erlang supervision trees https://learnyousomeerlang.com/supervisors. As a joke there we’re calling gen_severs “nanoservices”. Granted, that was mostly when microservices were the hot new thing.by rdtsc
- Whole lot of nothing.
This isn't about payment technologies, it's not about isolating transactions, it's about scaling the middle layer. What's worse it's not even explained what middle layer does.
No info on how routing works, no info on data synchronization.
Folks just learning Kubernetes and write extremely abstract stuff.
by Insimwytim - Nobody uses Amex for payments, so the system isn't ever under high load.
Just kidding!
I find the idea quite good, and have to assume that the amount of payment fails they experience due to partitions/outages isn't very high and that the post-payment reconciliation and reclamation process gives them the liberty to rank availability a bit higher than correctness.
One thing that looked a bit shaky was the interplay between the global transaction router's state of knowing which cells can handle a particular payment and the asynchronous distribution of the "failover data", which I presume it needs to know to route correctly. To me that seems to create a window where it might route to the wrong cell due to an outdated routing state.
It also doesn't go into the HA setup of the global transaction router itself.
But still, I kind of like the design.
by physix