Overview
Bank of America needed payment processing for Visa, wealth management, card, and loan payments to run through APIs at high volume with strict response times. Iron Brick architects led API-driven development of a payments integration layer that handles 2,000 transactions per second across three data centers in an A/B configuration, with a high-fault-tolerance F5 design (GTM/DNS between data centers, LTM within each) and every transaction meeting sub-second processing times.
The challenge
- Several payment types, including Visa, wealth management, card, and loan payments, had to be processed through a common, governed integration layer.
- Volumes reached thousands of transactions per second, and every transaction had to complete in under a second.
- The service needed high fault tolerance: it had to stay available through server failures, maintenance, and the loss of an entire data center.
| Customer | Bank of America |
|---|---|
| Throughput | 2,000 transactions per second |
| Resilience | Three data centers in an A/B configuration |
| Traffic management | F5 GTM/DNS between data centers, LTM within each, iRules, SSL offload, persistence |
| Response time | Sub-second processing for every payment type |
| Payment types | Visa, wealth management, card, and loan payments |
The Solution
API-driven development
Payment capabilities were defined as API contracts first, then built and tested against those contracts.
Layered payment APIs
Shared system APIs for back-end payment platforms, with process APIs for each payment type, so new channels reused the same services.
Three-data-center deployment
Services ran across three data centers in an A/B configuration, so traffic could shift without interrupting payments.
F5 GTM/DNS across data centers
F5 Global Traffic Manager (DNS) routed each request to a healthy data center, so a site outage or maintenance window did not interrupt payments.
F5 LTM within each data center
F5 Local Traffic Manager balanced traffic across the servers in each data center, with health monitors that removed failing nodes automatically.
iRules, SSL offload, and persistence
iRules applied custom routing and request handling at the edge, SSL offload moved encryption work off the application servers, and session persistence kept multi-step transactions on the same server.
Performance engineering
Load testing and tuning against the 2,000 transactions per second target and the sub-second response requirement.
Operational monitoring
Transaction-level monitoring and alerting so operations teams could see throughput, latency, and errors as they happened.
Results
2,000 transactions per second
Sustained throughput across the payments integration layer.
Sub-second processing
Visa, wealth, card, and loan payments met sub-second processing times.
High fault tolerance
F5 GTM/DNS and LTM across three data centers in an A/B configuration kept payments flowing through server and site failures.
Reusable payment services
API-driven design let new payment channels reuse existing services.
Engagements delivered by Iron Brick architects, directly and as part of prime contractor and platform partner teams. Agency names identify the customer and do not imply endorsement.
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