High Performing Transactions Processing - Best ways to scale up transaction processing from hundreds of thousands to hundreds of millions

• Autor(a) principal: Barros, Francisca Inês Marcos de
• Data de Publicação: 2023
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.22/23515
• topic: Payments; Software Performance; Load Testing; Capacity Planing; Reliability

In an era in which technology is more pervasive in our everyday lives, ultimately substituting physical currency with dematerialised alternatives (for example, credit and debit cards, electronic wallets), merchants are being compelled to adapt. As a result, all of them should have some method of receiving payments aimed towards this technological advancement or risk losing clients and, ultimately, the business itself. This demand is coupled with highly bureaucratic issues and the low investment capability of small and medium-sized merchants, which will almost likely make subscribing to these revolutionary new payment systems challenging. Hardware with a steep learning curve, long-term contracts, complex implementation charges, and undisclosed usage fees make it challenging for small local businesses to get paid. Regarding the complete market offer for this purpose, systems with payment terminals, their resilience and capacity to operate in full condition whenever the demand of utilisation increases remains the most important consideration of all - considering the enormous amount of transactions processed by the rising customer base. Therefore, organisations who want to enter this competitive industry must assure, in addition to security in the processing of sensitive data, the availability of their product throughout time, in order for these services to become accessible and trustworthy for their clients. The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate the existing limitations of Saltpay’s internal payment gateway, which constitutes one of the critical points of interaction for physical payment terminals, in order to contribute to the successful expansion of both the firm and its clients. Some of the issues that have already been identified are related to the latency introduced by the various requests made within the scope of a transaction (risk analysis, parameter validation, message transformation, information enrichment, tokenisation, and so on), but also to the consumption of transaction events that will inform all downstream systems of the transaction’s authorisation and that must be in near total synchrony. Analysing the load testing findings made it possible to identify one of the crucial points in the processing of transactions, the Processing-API, as well as various configurations that should be revised, such as Kubernetes’ automated scaling. This allowed for the design of expansion strategies to meet the increasing number of daily transactions, resulting in a more complete and competitive market offering.