PhonePe Processes 100M Daily Payments with 99.999% Uptime Using Aerospike
About PhonePe
PhonePe is India’s leading fintech super app, processing over 100 million transactions daily and serving 380 million registered users and 30 million merchants. Launched in 2016, the company has played a pivotal role in India's shift to digital payments, supporting Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions, merchant payments, financial services, and personalized engagement features across its platform. To maintain real-time performance and uninterrupted availability at this scale, PhonePe required an infrastructure capable of handling millions of transactions per second with ultra-low latency.
Explosive growth, database scaling, and fraud prevention
PhonePe’s rapid expansion to 380M users and 30M merchants required a fault-tolerant, low-latency infrastructure to handle 100M+ daily payment transactions while ensuring real-time fraud prevention and high availability.
Unprecedented growth in digital payments
Transaction volume surged to 3B per month, straining existing systems and demanding real-time processing at massive scale.
Scaling limitations of legacy databases
Relational and big data stores like HBase couldn’t support real-time updates or handle peak loads, causing payment processing bottlenecks and increasing operational complexity. HBase’s block cache was difficult to manage, limiting application-level control over caching and slowing performance.
Frequent failures and costly downtime
Disk and memory failures every 15 days led to weeks-long rolling restarts, while failover and disaster recovery remained complex.
Diverse use cases needed real-time performance
Fraud detection queries took too long, limiting real-time blocking. Personalization and engagement systems lagged, reducing user experience quality.
Aerospike powers a high-performance, fault-tolerant data layer
PhonePe deployed Aerospike to power its digital payments ecosystem, ensuring real-time transaction processing, fraud detection, and personalized user engagement while reducing infrastructure costs. It now operates hundreds of Aerospike clusters and thousands of server nodes across three on-premises data centers, managing over 160TB per site and processing millions of queries per second (QPS) with ultra-low latency.
Unmatched speed and reliability
Aerospike delivers sub-millisecond response times for payments and fraud detection, with active-active replication ensuring seamless failover and zero replication lag
Efficient storage and infrastructure
Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA) and workload-specific tuning enabled an 8x server footprint reduction—lowering costs while sustaining millions of QPS
Replaced HBase for better performance
Aerospike replaced key HBase workloads, reducing latency, hardware needs, and complexity, while serving as a high-performance cache for feature store use cases
Flexible consistency models
PhonePe uses Aerospike AP (availability-partition tolerant) mode for high availability and SC (strong consistency) mode for transactional integrity, optimizing for workload-specific performance and reliability
Seamless cross-data center replication
Aerospike XDR supports both unidirectional and bidirectional replication, maintaining data consistency across geographically distributed sites
Built-in event streaming and observability
Kafka connectors enable real-time event streaming, while Prometheus and Grafana support monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting
99.999% uptime, scalability, and efficiency
By optimizing infrastructure with Aerospike’s high-performance architecture, PhonePe achieved faster query response times and reduced operational complexity while scaling to billions of transactions.
99.999% uptime
Ensures uninterrupted digital payments across India with active-active availability.
5x higher throughput
Powers fraud detection and feature store lookups with sub-millisecond latency, even at peak scale.
8x reduction in server footprint
Reduces infrastructure costs while sustaining millions of QPS across diverse real-time workloads.
Testimonials
Our fraud detection system runs in real time, performing multiple checks in under 20 milliseconds out of Aerospike.
Burzin Engineer
PhonePeFounder and Chief Reliability OfficerAerospike has provided predictable performance without maintenance headaches, scaling effortlessly to millions of transactions. We’ve been sleeping peacefully at night for four years now.
Koushik Ramachandra
PhonePeSoftware ArchitectThe first thing that I noticed that was great about Aerospike was how accessible it was and how easy you could get going just by going through the documentation and then getting started within the same day. So we started with Aerospike and we are still on Aerospike after five years, so that's a testament to what things went right with a choice.
Guruprasad Sridharan
PhonePeSoftware ArchitectAdditional resources
For a deeper understanding and more insights, explore these additional resources.
- Video
PhonePe: Aerospike @ One of India's Largest Fintech Companies
Internet payment companies, typically described as digital payment platforms either increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market authority or on `platformization` of their capabilities. PhonePe has forged its way by combining both. - Webinar
Aerospike @ PhonePe: An SRE Perspective
Rakuten shares how they leverage Aerospike for their targeted or personalised advertisements for their Japanese shoppers. - Webinar
Data Modeling for Low Latency Querying
PhonePe discusses data modeling strategy for low latency querying using the Aerospike database in this meetup session
Get started with Aerospike
For high-performance, scalable data management and ultra-low latency, ideal for handling massive datasets and real-time applications.
PhonePe Processes 100M Daily Payments with 99.999% Uptime Using Aerospike
About PhonePe
PhonePe is India’s leading fintech super app, processing over 100 million transactions daily and serving 380 million registered users and 30 million merchants. Launched in 2016, the company has played a pivotal role in India's shift to digital payments, supporting Unified Payments Interface (UPI) transactions, merchant payments, financial services, and personalized engagement features across its platform. To maintain real-time performance and uninterrupted availability at this scale, PhonePe required an infrastructure capable of handling millions of transactions per second with ultra-low latency.
Explosive growth, database scaling, and fraud prevention
PhonePe’s rapid expansion to 380M users and 30M merchants required a fault-tolerant, low-latency infrastructure to handle 100M+ daily payment transactions while ensuring real-time fraud prevention and high availability.
Unprecedented growth in digital payments
Transaction volume surged to 3B per month, straining existing systems and demanding real-time processing at massive scale.
Scaling limitations of legacy databases
Relational and big data stores like HBase couldn’t support real-time updates or handle peak loads, causing payment processing bottlenecks and increasing operational complexity. HBase’s block cache was difficult to manage, limiting application-level control over caching and slowing performance.
Frequent failures and costly downtime
Disk and memory failures every 15 days led to weeks-long rolling restarts, while failover and disaster recovery remained complex.
Diverse use cases needed real-time performance
Fraud detection queries took too long, limiting real-time blocking. Personalization and engagement systems lagged, reducing user experience quality.
Aerospike powers a high-performance, fault-tolerant data layer
PhonePe deployed Aerospike to power its digital payments ecosystem, ensuring real-time transaction processing, fraud detection, and personalized user engagement while reducing infrastructure costs. It now operates hundreds of Aerospike clusters and thousands of server nodes across three on-premises data centers, managing over 160TB per site and processing millions of queries per second (QPS) with ultra-low latency.
Unmatched speed and reliability
Aerospike delivers sub-millisecond response times for payments and fraud detection, with active-active replication ensuring seamless failover and zero replication lag
Efficient storage and infrastructure
Hybrid Memory Architecture (HMA) and workload-specific tuning enabled an 8x server footprint reduction—lowering costs while sustaining millions of QPS
Replaced HBase for better performance
Aerospike replaced key HBase workloads, reducing latency, hardware needs, and complexity, while serving as a high-performance cache for feature store use cases
Flexible consistency models
PhonePe uses Aerospike AP (availability-partition tolerant) mode for high availability and SC (strong consistency) mode for transactional integrity, optimizing for workload-specific performance and reliability
Seamless cross-data center replication
Aerospike XDR supports both unidirectional and bidirectional replication, maintaining data consistency across geographically distributed sites
Built-in event streaming and observability
Kafka connectors enable real-time event streaming, while Prometheus and Grafana support monitoring, anomaly detection, and alerting
99.999% uptime, scalability, and efficiency
By optimizing infrastructure with Aerospike’s high-performance architecture, PhonePe achieved faster query response times and reduced operational complexity while scaling to billions of transactions.
99.999% uptime
Ensures uninterrupted digital payments across India with active-active availability.
5x higher throughput
Powers fraud detection and feature store lookups with sub-millisecond latency, even at peak scale.
8x reduction in server footprint
Reduces infrastructure costs while sustaining millions of QPS across diverse real-time workloads.
Testimonials
Our fraud detection system runs in real time, performing multiple checks in under 20 milliseconds out of Aerospike.
Burzin Engineer
PhonePeFounder and Chief Reliability OfficerAerospike has provided predictable performance without maintenance headaches, scaling effortlessly to millions of transactions. We’ve been sleeping peacefully at night for four years now.
Koushik Ramachandra
PhonePeSoftware ArchitectThe first thing that I noticed that was great about Aerospike was how accessible it was and how easy you could get going just by going through the documentation and then getting started within the same day. So we started with Aerospike and we are still on Aerospike after five years, so that's a testament to what things went right with a choice.
Guruprasad Sridharan
PhonePeSoftware ArchitectAdditional resources
For a deeper understanding and more insights, explore these additional resources.
- Video
PhonePe: Aerospike @ One of India's Largest Fintech Companies
Internet payment companies, typically described as digital payment platforms either increasingly rely on infrastructural properties to expand and maintain their market authority or on `platformization` of their capabilities. PhonePe has forged its way by combining both. - Webinar
Aerospike @ PhonePe: An SRE Perspective
Rakuten shares how they leverage Aerospike for their targeted or personalised advertisements for their Japanese shoppers. - Webinar
Data Modeling for Low Latency Querying
PhonePe discusses data modeling strategy for low latency querying using the Aerospike database in this meetup session
Get started with Aerospike
For high-performance, scalable data management and ultra-low latency, ideal for handling massive datasets and real-time applications.