skifunkster

In this scenario we did have an account manager at Stripe, however fortunately and unfortunately the show brought in somewhere in the region of 7X the initial target.

Servereless stampeding a payment processor like Stripe as opposed to something like RDS are two different kettles of fish, as am sure you can imagine, stripe have very high capacity and there is 1:1 relationship to the user unlike DB writes, where there may be many per transaction / action.

I have don't it both ways in the past, queueing payments and processing later. Problem is with doing that you cannot immediately return card errors, which has a large effect on conversion. With something like Amazon it is fine to do that, as users inevitably come back to buy the products they want, for donations not so much.

For previous donation platforms operating at same scale on AWS we use Serverless Framework and have our own lambda wrapper which wraps the code and provides monitoring, etc...

For this we just wrote straight up Node JS and plumbing through to Stripe, super simple really. Deployed via github actions on RTE's cloudflare account, really simple. No one time charges from the Stripe side or anywhere really. Only other cost was Sentry, which was more than the hosting as we used it for a lot of the informational alongside error logging.

We have a separate article en-route with all the technicals, just waiting on client sign off, as is stats heavy...

Spikey, unpredictable traffic, serverless is the way.

Sorry about the title.

Yeah, we literally used it as a stripe proxy and to serve frontend. All data was served in stripe and then queried using Stripe Sigma, their flavour of Presto.

Can tell you the total cost from RTE does Comic Relief, which was the same size, was about 16 euros to host the whole thing. This would be about the same, however is on RTE's cloudflare account, so not easy to get breakdown.

Workers were just a good fit not to have to host anything, due to the unpredictable number of donations that we would be getting through. Deployment and development is also really easy.

Have run the same size campaign on lambda and cloudflare now, so can probably speak from experience.

Cloudflare definitely has a place, but is definitely nowhere near as feature rich as the AWS ecosystem. For this use case it was perfect. Lack of warm up and responsiveness on cloudflare is a strong draw.

Here is my previous article on our AWS donation system.

https://read.iopipe.com/the-journey-to-90-serverless-at-comi...