About Form3
Form3, a cloud payment processing platform, leverages NATS for its messaging and communications between banks and external payment processing systems, enabling faster payment processing as a service with improved SLAs, multiple clouds and near-instant failover.
Overview
Form3 is a Payments-as-a-Service platform operating in the AWS cloud, processing over 1 million faster payment transactions per day. The platform needed to expand its distributed architecture by pushing payment processing closer to end users, reduce data latency, and improve availability across multiple clouds.
Challenges
Form3, a Payments-as-a-Service platform in the AWS cloud, wanted to expand its distributed architecture infrastructure by pushing payment processing closers to end users, reduce data latency and improve availability. It was processing over 1 million faster payments trans- actions a day. But AWS’s SQS queues were causing delays of up to 300 milliseconds. And AWS’s 99.9% uptime SLAs were insufficient for the critical payment infrastructure. Form3 needed to create a higher availability service with multi-cloud capabilities for cloud choice and near-instant failover. Additionally, physical data centers required lightweight event bus systems to handle their limited compute footprint and capacity. Form3 faced several critical challenges as their platform grew:
- Rapid growth & banking requirements stressed Form3’s payment platform
- Inability to meet customer SLAs due to delays up to 300 milliseconds (ms) caused by AWS SQS queues
- Increased complexity & security due to multiple standards and regulatory requirements
- Required multi-cloud capabilities for instant cloud switching, scaling, and resiliency
Why NATS
Form3 replaced its legacy pub-sub event bus and message services with NATS, an open-source, cloud-native messaging platform sponsored by Synadia. NATS met Form3 requirements for performance, scalability, latency, reliability, resilience and compute. Since NATS is simple to set up and offers low latency and high capacity per server, it works in almost any environment and in any cloud. With NATS, Form3 created a cloud- agnostic architecture leveraging JetStream and its highly configurable persistence layer, enabling workloads to shift among clouds.
- Open source, cloud-native, cloud-agnostic messaging & communications platform
- Scalable, low latency & resilient system with no need for specialized tools or middleware
- Simple to use, lightweight & fast, secure & compliant
- JetStream integration with configurable persistence layer for cloud-switching and failover
Technical Benefits
- Simple to set up with low latency and high capacity per server
- Works equally well in almost any environment and in any cloud
- Cloud-agnostic architecture enabling workload shifts among clouds
- Shares similar design principles with Go language (performance, scalability, ease of use)
- Minimal resources with simple text-based protocol to reduce complexity
- Data-at-rest encryption by default
Results
With NATS and JetStream, Form3 successfully built a multi-cloud, low-latency payments platform that is scalable, resilient, and efficient.
- Low Latency: NATS decreased average latency by 6x – from 300ms to 50ms – by replacing SQS and SNS
- Improved developer productivity: Form3’s Go language and NATS share similar design principles – performance, scalability and ease of use.
- Performance & scalability: NATS delivered higher messaging throughput on a smaller cloud footprint and runs in low resource environments.
- High reliability: NATS never requires restarts.
- Lightweight: NATS uses minimal resources and simple text-based protocol to reduce complexity. Offers easy integration without infrastructure changes.
- Data persistence: Jetstream’s highly configurable persistence layer features a distributed key/value database, data-at-rest encryption by default and horizontal scalability.
- Multi-cloud choice: NATs enables a multi-cloud-ready, active/active architecture for higher uptimes
