MetroPay — 24/7 Payments Reliability & SRE
A 24/7 managed reliability program that moved MetroPay from reactive firefighting to SLO-driven operations with airtight observability, faster recoveries, and audit-ready security.
SCOPE
What We Did
Unified Observability & SLOs
Implemented Datadog APM, metrics, logs, and synthetics with service-level objectives and error budgets across payment APIs and checkout flows.
Incident Response & On-Call
Designed escalation paths, runbooks, and on-call rotations; automated paging and post-incident RCAs with action tracking.
Security & Patching
Monthly patch cycles, vulnerability scanning, hardened images, secrets management, and compliance evidence collection.
Backups & Disaster Recovery
Automated daily backups, quarterly restore tests, and DR playbooks achieving RPO ≈15 min / RTO ≈1 hr.
CI/CD & Release Engineering
GitHub Actions pipelines with canary releases, progressive rollouts, and automated rollbacks to reduce change failure rate.
Performance & Cost Tuning
Kubernetes HPA tuning, NGINX optimizations, connection pooling, and cache strategies for predictable peak performance.
Outcomes Delivered
Uptime 99.97% across critical payment services
P95 latency ↓28% on payment APIs
MTTD ↓65% and MTTR ↓45% with runbooked responses
Change failure rate ↓40% via canary + automated rollback
Passed PCI-DSS audit with automated evidence collection
BRIEF
MetroPay processes high-volume card transactions with strict SLAs and seasonal peaks.
They needed round-the-clock coverage, measurable reliability, and compliance without slowing product delivery.
CHALLENGE
Fragmented monitoring and alert fatigue led to slow detection and inconsistent incident handling.
Peak-time degradations and risky deploys increased cart abandonment and chargeback exposure.
Compliance burden (PCI-DSS) required auditable controls, secure pipeline, and evidence automation.
From incidents to SLOs: a reliability operating model
OBSERVABILITY & SLOS
Mapped golden signals, added distributed tracing, and defined SLOs (availability, latency) with error budgets and dashboard drill-downs.
INCIDENT RESPONSE
Built runbooks, on-call rotations, and graded severities; automated paging, status updates, and post-incident RCAs with owners and due dates.
SECURITY & COMPLIANCE
Hardened containers, managed secrets, monthly patch/vuln cycles, and audit trails—exported as evidence bundles for PCI controls.
RELEASE SAFETY
CI/CD with canary and progressive delivery, health-based promotions, and one-click rollback to reduce change failure rate.
Key Results & Impact
The comprehensive strategy delivered exceptional results across all key performance indicators, establishing Vero Diamonds as a leader in the luxury lab-grown diamond market.
Service Uptime
SLO-aligned operations and HA architecture ensured near-continuous availability.
P95 Latency
NGINX + API optimizations and autoscaling improved payment responsiveness.
MTTD / MTTR
Unified alerts and runbooks cut detection and recovery times substantially.
PCI-DSS Pass
Compliance evidence automated from monitoring, CI/CD, and access logs.
Always-On, Audit-Ready, Peak-Proof
With proactive monitoring, disciplined incident management, and safer releases, MetroPay ships faster while meeting stringent uptime and compliance targets.