Uptime isn't a metric — it's a promise
When a payment fails because your processor is down, the customer doesn't retry — they leave. In payments, downtime doesn't just cost you revenue; it costs you trust. That's why we've engineered Pochipay from the ground up for 99.99% availability, which translates to less than 53 minutes of unplanned downtime per year.
Here's how we do it.
Multi-region, active-active architecture
Pochipay runs across multiple cloud regions with an active-active configuration. Every region can handle 100% of traffic independently, so a complete regional outage doesn't affect payment processing.
Traffic is distributed using latency-based DNS routing, directing each request to the nearest healthy region. If a region becomes unhealthy, traffic automatically shifts within seconds — no manual intervention required.
Our data layer uses synchronous replication with conflict-free resolution, ensuring consistency across regions without sacrificing write performance. This is critical for payment systems where double-charging or lost transactions are unacceptable.
Automated failover at every layer
Redundancy extends beyond infrastructure to every component in the payment flow:
• Acquirer failover: If an acquirer connection drops, transactions automatically cascade to the next available acquirer within the same region, with sub-second switching.
• Database failover: Automated promotion of read replicas to primary with zero-downtime switchover. We test failover procedures weekly in production using controlled chaos engineering.
• Service mesh: Individual microservices can fail and restart without affecting the overall payment flow. Circuit breakers prevent cascade failures from propagating across the system.
• DNS failover: Multi-provider DNS with health checking ensures resolution remains available even if a DNS provider experiences issues.
Observability and incident response
We monitor over 10,000 metrics in real time, with anomaly detection alerting on-call engineers before issues become customer-facing. Our mean time to detection (MTTD) is under 60 seconds, and mean time to resolution (MTTR) is under 15 minutes.
Every incident triggers a blameless post-mortem with concrete action items. We publish quarterly reliability reports so merchants can track our performance transparently.
Our engineering culture treats every minute of downtime as a learning opportunity. We run regular game days where we intentionally inject failures into production to validate our resilience mechanisms and train our incident response muscles.
The result
Over the past 12 months, Pochipay has maintained 99.994% uptime — exceeding our SLA commitment. We processed over 7.6 billion transactions without a single platform-wide outage.
For our merchants, this means they can confidently build their businesses on Pochipay, knowing that their payment infrastructure won't be the thing that lets them down.