13 comments

[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 37.3 ms ] thread
This is cool, but a part of me has to be flip, and humanity is kind of hilarious to me. All of this amazing infrastructure and hard work to essentially just very carefully and accurately subtract one number from another in a way that makes auditing easy.
A fascinating en dash, used as an em dash, followed by two em dashes.

Hmmm.

Re: transition to micro services (from monolith).

I’m surprised a network so sensitive to latency (as are payment networks), was able to achieve their latency SLAs with micro services.

Maybe Amex being a closed-loop network helps with latency?

Doesn't matter if you have 500 microservices if only one or two take part in card authorization (as it should be if microservices were architected correctly).

There's ton of logic on non-critical path that can be extracted to other microservices and called asynchronously - settlements, refunds, rewards, all management and reporting functionalities - to name just a few.

Cmd+F "Kubernetes".

Oh Jesus Christ.

Norton Antivirus for Android doesn't allow me to access the site. Hmm.
I wonder what IaC tooling they used. Interesting that “Kubernetes” and “Envoy” are the only product names mentioned that I noticed.
> If anomalies were detected

but also

> Latency, throughput, and resiliency characteristics had to remain consistent, and in some cases improve.

> Payment requests could not be dropped, delayed, or left unanswered.

what else would an "anomaly" be?

unfortunately due to all this A.I noise we are drowning a lot of good things happening in tech specially around DBs

migrating services is easier if your DB supports those things and is more oriented around AP

now a lot of people just jump straight to microservices without considering what their DB can do for them, or if at times they need a relational DB, or if their use case can be served by a hybrid Db.

if you see most of the talks at Monster Scale [0]: They're around DBs

https://www.scylladb.com/monster-scale-summit/on-demand/

NextDNS has blacklisted americanexpress.io as a threat.
Its funny how you can instantly point out which parts are written by AI.

> No logic, no message parsing, just simple forwarding.