To minimize failed payments for our users, Stripe targets 99.9995% reliability. As traffic grew beyond 1.6% of global GDP, this put intense strain on the service mesh. This is the story of the infrastructure team replacing Envoy, a popular solution, with an alternative architecture.
We all know the stereotypes of working at enterprise tech companies: endless bureaucracy and behemoth codebases running on a years-old language version. Most organizations know they should modernize quickly, but haven’t figured out how to build an upgrade path compatible with a large codebase. The recurring cost of upgrading keeps most large JVM codebases trailing behind the latest Java versions.