A conference talk by a staff engineer at SmallPDF covering the complexities of orchestrating payments for tens of millions of users globally. Topics include a real incident where a Braintree API key deletion caused 12 hours of payment downtime and ~$5-10K in lost revenue, the challenges of global payment methods (Alipay, UPI, SEPA, Pix, Twint), tax compliance across jurisdictions, chargeback risks, and how payment orchestration solves these problems. The talk presents a frontend-driven orchestration architecture in React that dynamically selects payment gateways and methods based on user country, A/B tests, and currency — achieving a 70% reduction in component bundle size. It also covers 'payments as code' for version control and testing, anomaly detection with Datadog, and chaos engineering game days to reduce mean time to resolution.
Sort: