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I don't use Twilio, but this was an interesting write-up. After reading it, I can totally understand how important it is to have safe-guards and redundancies ba
by chill1 13y ago
I don't use Twilio, but this was an interesting write-up. After reading it, I can totally understand how important it is to have safe-guards and redundancies baked into user balance information. I like how they even mentioned (although a bit vaguely) how they plan to implement those additional protections [1].
[1] "We are now introducing robust fail-safes, so that if billing balances don’t exist or cannot be written, the system will not suspend accounts or charge credit cards. Finally, we will be updating the billing system to validate against our double-bookkeeping databases in real-time."
- RobSpectre 13y agoTruthfully the billing system is one of the most fascinating parts of our stack to me. Twilio's utility pricing model generates an incredible volume of minute transactions, which is a fascinating engineering problem to solve at scale. That solution ultimately came up short last week, but think the foresight behind a number of the features (double bookkeeping to an unrelated, persistent datastore in particular) aided in recovery.