In this blog post, our Chief Technology Officer, Tony Allen, shares how Recurly helps companies scale for large digital events like the big game, shopping holidays, and more.

Digital events have dominated our screens. Behind the scenes, companies are responsible for creating the capacity to power these occurrences, but as your business grows, demand increases and the question becomes, “Can my business handle this extra load?” 

With hundreds of ways to start addressing scalability, selecting grounding technologies that you want to leverage and grow upon is imperative. For us, our technology is grounded in becoming a cloud-native platform, which means investing in the use of Kubernetes and automation, then building our scalability around that core concept. Let’s dive deeper into how Recurly makes scalability possible.

What is cloud native?

Containerization, immutable infrastructure, deployment automation, an intelligent network mesh, and purpose-built microservices are the modern bedrock that unlocks effortless and elastic horizontal scalability through our cloud partners. 

In what ways does Recurly allow customers to scale?

We run a cloud-native, multi-tenant SaaS platform on top of Kubernetes, which means it has scaling built into it from a platform perspective. All of the components that our customers leverage and interact within Recurly dynamically scale up or down based on volume and demand. This allows them to scale their businesses not just over time, but during peaks and valleys as well, without needing to pre-schedule those events with Recurly.

You’d be amazed how many times companies, no matter what size, end up hitting this block in the road where they’re like, “We’d love to go to Germany, but we’d have to replace our entire infrastructure in order to do that.” It doesn’t take a huge amount of work upfront to make sure you’re working with companies that have the right plugins and tools to work with other international platforms.

As a customer, you are able to focus on responding to your business as it happens in real-time, taking advantage of high traffic and activity to grow without having to worry about whether or not Recurly can scale with you. 

How does Recurly help during real-time events?

Recurly’s response time is vital to the success of large digital events in all industries, from flash sales and Black Friday to live events in streaming. As a partner, it’s important that the response rate of our APIs stays consistent even under load. For example, a peak event could be a large fight on a streaming platform or another major sporting event. If our systems slow down or we're not responding quickly enough, it presents a ripple effect upstream into the streaming platform’s systems and impacts their ability to acquire customers, take on more traffic, and stream content. In media and especially the streaming world, scalability on-demand is imperative. If someone is trying to participate in something that's happening right now, you can't have a failing system and ask them to come back in an hour–it's not a movie they're renting. They're looking for access to that content in real-time, and a partner like Recurly can support that growth and that kind of demand.

In the retail space, the importance of response time is magnified because businesses are handling customer experiences, inventory management systems, and transaction processing systems simultaneously. Any problems that arise in any aspect directly affect the others. If Recurly is slowing down, retailers risk poor inventory management or shipping delays when they may have commitments to their customers. The ability to scale and bill consistently and repeatedly is imperative for companies that are dealing with physical goods. 

On the payment side of things, Recurly sets you up for success with functionality around gateway routing and gateway failover. While it may not be as obvious, you never want to be reliant on a single gateway or single payment provider because if that payment provider fails during a live event, you are forced to face the consequences of that upstream impact. With Recurly, you can leverage multiple payment providers at once, strengthening your business and decreasing the likelihood of experiencing an outage during peak periods.

Using Recurly’s APIs

Recurly’s most recent API was built around the concept of higher performance. The call patterns are built to allow customers to more efficiently share a more robust set of instructions in a single call. With this updated technology, Recruly.js supports customers in building an even more highly scalable platform to interact with Recurly.

With sustainable scalability and reliability built into Recurly, you can leave the highly technical work to our teams, whether that’s the complexities of billing management or scaling connections to your gateways. With a partner like Recurly, you can focus on what's core to your business, test different strategies, and grow like never before.