Speaker
Abstract
Stripe processes over $1 trillion in payments annually with industry-leading reliability, powered by its custom-built document database, DocDB, built on top of open source MongoDB. Stripe's DocDB serves over five million queries per second from Stripe’s product applications. Our deployment is also highly customized to provide low latency and diverse access, with 10,000+ distinct query shapes over petabytes of important financial data that lives in 5,000+ collections distributed over 2,000+ database shards.
This session unveils the engineering behind Stripe’s DocDB and dives deep into its Data Movement Platform, a foundational primitive that allows us to migrate terabytes of data across database shards at lightning speed and is key to provide a durable, reliable, scalable, and efficient database-as-a-service to product teams at Stripe. We’ll explore the challenges of scaling the online database backing a trillion-dollar payment infrastructure, ensuring data consistency and high reliability. Key learnings include optimizing bulk data ingestion in MongoDB and implementing a traffic switch protocol for seamless, zero-downtime data movement across database shards. Attendees will gain practical insights for building high-availability database systems and navigating complex migrations without compromising performance.
Interview
My talk covers the core architectural strategies to horizontally scale open-source MongoDB to handle millions of queries per second over petabytes of data with high reliability and low-latency in multi-tenant environments. A key focus will be on the critical role of a robust, zero-downtime data movement platform in enabling elastic scaling without impacting the performance and availability of your workloads.
As we head toward 2026, reliability isn't just a feature—it's the ultimate moat in an era of AI-driven scale. At the core of this reliability challenge are databases. Investing in the foundational primitives to build a reliable, scalable and performant database platform for product engineering now fortifies the data backbone of your systems, turning potential single points of failure into scalable strengths that sustain growth amid scaling pressures.
Developers and architects face significant challenges when horizontally scaling stateful systems such as databases, primarily revolving around increased architectural and operational complexity, maintaining data consistency, high availability and ensuring optimal query performance during migrations in a distributed environment.
I hope attendees audit their core infrastructure systems—like databases—for hidden reliability gaps right away: map out failure modes in a quick chaos drill or dependency graph, then prioritize one fix. It's the spark that turns "good enough" systems into unbreakable ones, and we've seen it work well with teams at Stripe.
QCon goes beyond hype with talks from builders who've solved the same hairy problems you face, plus ample time for peer discussions that yield fresh perspectives about the problems top of mind for you.
Topics
QCon San Francisco 2025 is a three day conference for senior software engineers, architects and team leads. An international program committee of working engineers selects every session. Patterns and practices, not products and pitches.
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