Simon Willison’s Weblog

Stripe: Online migrations at scale (via) This 2017 blog entry from Jacqueline Xu at Stripe provides a very clear description of the “dual writes” pattern for applying complex data migrations without downtime: dual write to new and old tables, update the read paths, update the write paths and finally remove the now obsolete data—illustrated with an example of upgrading customers from having a single to multiple subscriptions.

# 5th November 2023, 4:06 pm / migrations, databases, stripe, zero-downtime

Scaling a High-traffic Rate Limiting Stack With Redis Cluster. Brandur Leach describes the simple, elegant and performant design of Redis Cluster, and talks about how Stripe used it to scaled their rate-limiting from one to ten nodes.

# 26th April 2018, 6:34 pm / brandur-leach, redis, rate-limiting, scaling, stripe

Implementing Stripe-like Idempotency Keys in Postgres (via) Having clients send “idempotency keys” with API requests in order to be able to safely retry them if something’s goes wrong is a really neat trick for making transactional APIs more robust. Here Brandur Leach talks implementation strategies.

# 27th October 2017, 5:51 pm / api-design, idempotency, postgresql, brandur-leach, stripe