Stripe Zero-Downtime Data Migration Platform: Millisecond Switching for PB-Scale Data Transfers
Stripe's Zero-Downtime Data Movement Platform
At QCon San Francisco 2025, Jimmy Morzaria, Staff Software Engineer at Stripe, unveiled the company’s Zero-Downtime Data Movement Platform — a petabyte-scale migration system with traffic cutovers typically completing in milliseconds.
This platform supports 5 million database queries per second across 2,000+ MongoDB shards, achieving 99.9995% availability for $1.4 trillion in annual payments.
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Core Principles of Stripe’s Migration Process
The migration blueprint, spanning six phases, is guided by three essential principles:
- Maintain data consistency with downtime shorter than a node failover.
- Minimize performance impact on live queries.
- Support shards of all sizes — from small datasets to tens of terabytes.
Stages of Stripe's DocDB zero-downtime data movement
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Step-by-Step Migration Process
1. Migration Registration
- Updates the routing metadata service.
- Registers new target shards and their key ranges.
- Records the future destination of data before movement begins.
2. Bulk Data Import
- Uses an optimized import service — 10× faster than standard imports.
- Index-aligned insert ordering:
- Data sorted by most-used indexes within each shard.
- Aligns with MongoDB’s B-tree engine, yielding up to 10× speed improvements.
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3. Async Replication
A dedicated replication service:
- Maintains bidirectional sync between source and target shards.
- Captures ongoing source changes and replicates them back to source shards.
- Enables full rollback capability in case of issues — critical for financial data integrity.
Architecture overview of the async replication step
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4. Validation
A validation service:
- Compares source and target shard data for correctness.
- Verifies integrity before any traffic switching.
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5. Traffic Switch (Cutover)
The most sophisticated phase, based on versioned gating:
Traffic switch powered by “versioned gating” — minimal downtime
Sequence:
- Client application queries via the proxy (version 1 → source DB).
- Coordinator sets version 2, verifies replication sync.
- Proxy fetches updated routes and sends queries to target DB.
- Source shard continues receiving updates → preserves rollback path.
Timing: Entire switch completes in milliseconds to 2 seconds, making disruption virtually imperceptible.
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6. Migration Deregistration
- Cleans up migration metadata.
- Decommissions infrastructure used during migration.
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Advanced Capabilities
Beyond typical scale-out migrations, the platform also supports:
- Shard merging
- Multi-release MongoDB version upgrades
- Tenancy model transitions
Design choice:
- In-house build to meet:
- Security enforcement
- Predictable performance
- Multi-tenancy with enforced quotas
By 2020, shard sizes reached tens of terabytes, necessitating a systematic migration solution.
Morzaria stressed that 40% of customers abandon transactions after payment denials — making zero downtime mission critical.
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Broader Implications & Tooling Synergies
This precision-engineered migration system demonstrates how large-scale infrastructure can evolve without service disruption.
Open-source ecosystems like AiToEarn complement such goals by:
- Enabling AI-powered content generation.
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- Providing analytics tracking and AI model rankings.
- Streamlining monetization while retaining data control.
- See GitHub and docs.
Platforms with coordinated updates and real-time monitoring mirror key principles from zero-downtime migrations — ensuring speed, safety, and scalability.
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In summary: Stripe’s Zero-Downtime Data Movement Platform illustrates the importance of strategic infrastructure investments for operational resilience, security, and seamless scaling — lessons that can inform both enterprise data workflows and multi-platform automation systems.
