Actor-Based Payment Engine With Event Sourcing for Real-Time Throughput
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
Processing a high volume of real-time payments (over 100 payments per second with over 99% uptime and failure resistance is challenging due to the limitations of existing technologies in scalability, complexity, and latency.
Innovation Solution
An actor model payment processing engine (PPE) using event sourcing and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) with auto-scaling and self-healing capabilities, implemented with an Akka framework, to handle payment processing efficiently, ensuring high throughput and resilience.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Productivity
If traditional payment processing systems are used to handle high volume real-time payments, then payment processing capability is improved, but system complexity and resource consumption increase
Solution Approach 1:
The payment processing system is segmented into independent actors (payment instruction actor, payment execution actor, refund actor, etc.) that can operate autonomously. Each actor handles specific payment-related tasks, allowing the system to process multiple payment types and operations simultaneously without increasing overall system complexity.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent introduces an event-sourcing dimension where system state is derived from a sequence of events stored in an event journal rather than maintaining traditional stateful data structures. This transforms the system from a stateful architecture to an event-driven architecture, enabling better scalability and reduced complexity.
2Reliability
If traditional payment processing systems are used to ensure high availability, then uptime is improved, but resource consumption and cost increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system implements self-healing capabilities where the payment processing engine automatically detects and recovers from failures without human intervention. The event-sourced architecture enables automatic state reconstruction from events, and the system can autonomously handle failures, reducing the need for redundant resources while maintaining high availability.
Solution Approach 2:
The patent changes the fundamental parameter of state management from traditional in-memory or database state to event-based state stored in an event journal. This parameter change enables the system to maintain reliability with fewer resources by allowing rapid state recovery through event replay rather than requiring extensive redundancy.
3Manufacturing precision
If stateful processing is used for payment instructions, then payment processing accuracy is improved, but system latency and complexity increase
Solution Approach 1:
The patent extracts state management from the payment processing logic itself and stores it externally in an event journal. Actors are stateless by default, retrieving their state from events when needed, which reduces processing latency while maintaining accuracy through event-based state reconstruction.
Solution Approach 2:
Payment instructions are validated and processed against pre-established business rules and event history before execution. The system performs preliminary checks using the event journal to verify payment validity, ensuring accuracy without requiring complex stateful processing during the actual payment execution.
Data Source
AI summary
Methods, systems, and techniques for using an actor model payment processing engine to process payments. A payment instruction is received. An event corresponding to the payment instruction is stored in an event journal. The payment processing engine, which is event-sourced and actor-based, performs the payment instruction. Performing the payment instruction involves transitioning the engine through one or more states in response to the payment instruction, and may involve performing actions with non-event sourced and event sourced actors in both stateless and stateful environments.