Stripe Payment Processing

Stripe

Stripe processes billions of dollars in payments annually across 135+ currencies. Their architecture prioritizes PCI DSS compliance at every layer, from card tokenization at the edge to encrypted storage at rest. Essential for fintech teams building PCI-compliant payment platforms with real-time fraud scoring and reliable webhook delivery.

Data Flow

Web Application Firewall

Payment API

Card Tokenizer

Payment Service

Fraud Detection

Webhook Queue

Webhook Delivery

Payment Records

Idempotency Store

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Service Breakdown (9 services)

Compute4 services

Payment Service

•Runs containerized microservices at scale
•Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
•Supports rolling deployments and health checks

Fraud Detection

•Runs containerized microservices at scale
•Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
•Supports rolling deployments and health checks

Webhook Delivery

•Runs containerized microservices at scale
•Auto-scales based on CPU and memory utilization
•Supports rolling deployments and health checks

Card Tokenizer

•Executes serverless functions on demand
•Scales automatically with zero idle cost
•Ideal for event-driven and async workflows

Networking2 services

Web Application Firewall

•Filters malicious web traffic with custom rules
•Protects against OWASP top 10 threats
•Inspects HTTP requests at the edge

Payment API

•Routes and throttles incoming API requests
•Enforces authentication and rate limiting
•Provides a unified entry point for microservices

Messaging1 service

Webhook Queue

•Decouples services with reliable message queuing
•Supports standard and FIFO delivery modes
•Scales automatically with message volume

Data2 services

Payment Records

•Manages relational databases with automated backups
•Supports Multi-AZ for high availability
•Handles read replicas for scaling reads

Idempotency Store

•Provides single-digit millisecond reads and writes
•Scales throughput automatically with demand
•Supports global tables for multi-region access

Scaling Strategy

Payment processing scales through SQS-based decoupling between the payment API and webhook delivery. Idempotency keys stored in DynamoDB prevent duplicate charges during retries. The fraud detection service scales independently using ECS auto-scaling, and CloudHSM provides hardware-backed key management that meets PCI HSM requirements without scaling bottlenecks.