How to use this tool

Scaling Roadmap — Guide

How to generate a personalised scaling roadmap for your payment infrastructure, what each phase delivers, and how to use the output for engineering planning.

What is this tool for?

Scaling a payment system is not linear — it requires specific architectural changes at specific transaction volume thresholds. What works at 100 TPS (Lambda on-demand, Aurora t3.medium) fails at 5,000 TPS. Knowing which changes to make, and in which order, prevents premature over-engineering and reactive fire-fighting as you scale.

This tool generates a personalised scaling roadmap from your current TPS to your target TPS, breaking the journey into phases with specific infrastructure tasks, estimated costs, and implementation effort. Each phase is aligned to PCI DSS compliance requirements.

Step-by-step walkthrough

Step 1 — Enter current and target TPS
  1. Enter your current TPS — your peak transactions per second today. Use your CloudWatch metrics or calculate from monthly transaction volume.
  2. Enter your target TPS — your 12–18 month projected peak. Be realistic: 3× current is a reasonable planning horizon for most growth-stage companies.
Step 2 — Configure options
  1. Toggle Multi-region to include multi-region infrastructure in the roadmap tasks and cost estimates.
  2. The roadmap determines which phases apply to your TPS range and shows only the relevant phases.
Step 3 — Review the roadmap
  1. Each phase card shows the TPS range, infrastructure tasks (with specific configuration values), estimated monthly cost, and estimated implementation effort in weeks.
  2. Tasks marked with a padlock icon require a paid membership to view the full detail.
  3. Expand the infrastructure panel to see the specific AWS service configuration for that tier.
Step 4 — Export the roadmap
  1. Click Export Roadmap to download the full roadmap as a document.
  2. Use it as input for your engineering sprint planning, board infrastructure presentation, or Series A technical due diligence pack.

Scaling phases explained

Phase 1Foundation & PCI Baseline— 0–500 TPS
PCI-compliant infrastructure foundation. Dedicated VPC, encrypted RDS, API Gateway rate limiting, CloudWatch alarms. Suitable for pre-PMF through early production.
Phase 2Horizontal Scale & Async Processing— 500–3,000 TPS
ECS Fargate autoscaling, SQS async processing for webhooks and refunds, ElastiCache for idempotency, circuit breakers, blue/green deployments.
Phase 3Multi-Region & High Availability— 3,000–20,000 TPS
Active-passive multi-region with DynamoDB Global Tables, Aurora Global Database, Route 53 health check failover. RTO < 5 minutes.
Phase 4Global Active-Active— 20,000+ TPS
Active-active multi-region with weighted routing, read replicas, CloudFront distribution, event-driven architecture. Enterprise-grade SLAs.

Key terms

TPSTransactions per second — the rate of payment transactions your infrastructure can process. Peak TPS is the maximum burst your system must handle without degradation.
AutoscalingAWS capability to automatically add or remove compute capacity based on demand. ECS Fargate autoscaling uses CPU utilisation or SQS queue depth as scaling signals.
Circuit breakerA resilience pattern that detects repeated failures to an external dependency (e.g. payment gateway) and temporarily stops sending requests, allowing the system to recover without cascading failures.
Blue/green deploymentA deployment strategy that runs two identical production environments. New releases deploy to the green environment; traffic switches over once tested. Enables zero-downtime payment service releases.
Provisioned DynamoDBDynamoDB billing mode where you pre-specify read and write capacity units. Significantly cheaper than on-demand at high, consistent throughput. Typically cost-effective above 1M transactions/month.
Active-activeA multi-region deployment mode where both regions process live traffic simultaneously. Provides the lowest RTO (seconds) but requires careful consistency management for shared state.

Frequently asked questions

Ready to plan your scaling roadmap?
Enter your current and target TPS and get a phased scaling plan with infrastructure tasks, costs, and effort estimates.