Migrating Primer’s Live Payments Platform to CockroachDB with Zero Downtime | RoachFest London

Description

When you're routing payments across dozens of payment providers worldwide, database downtime isn't an option. As Primer's payment orchestration platform scaled, its single-write Postgres database on Amazon RDS was approaching a wall: vertical scaling has a ceiling, and a single writer adds complexity and outage risk as you grow and look to go multi-region. In this session, Vik Bhatti, Senior Engineering Manager at Primer, shares how they migrated mission-critical payments workloads from PostgreSQL to CockroachDB without disrupting the merchants who rely on them, using two very different migration strategies for different workloads. He'll cover what made the cutovers hard, how they held zero downtime throughout, and what a scalable distributed database has unlocked since.