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Highly Resilient Affirm Checkout Architecture

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The article explains Affirm's highly resilient checkout architecture to achieve four 9s (99.99%) availability, with a goal of less than 52 minutes of downtime per year.

Specifically, the article covers:

  • Affirm's current checkout service architecture running on Amazon EKS and using various AWS services
  • Architectural decisions to achieve four 9s availability in a single AWS region, including multi-AZ redundancy, relying on four 9s+ AWS services, graceful degradation for optional microservices, and maintaining a disaster recovery plan
  • Isolation between different workloads using separate Kubernetes deployments and Istio VirtualService
  • Evaluation of an active-active multi-region architecture and the decision to invest in it later when architecting for five 9s availability
  • Conclusion that simpler architectures result in more reliable systems, and the plan to improve availability incrementally


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