Stripe’s Docdb: How Zero-Downtime Data Movement Powers Trillion-Dollar Payment Processing

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.