[HN Gopher] Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in
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Tolerating full cloud outages with Monzo Stand-in
Author : abritishguy
Score : 47 points
Date : 2025-02-13 18:23 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (monzo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (monzo.com)
| noodlesUK wrote:
| This seems especially relevant given the massive outage that
| Barclays, another major UK bank just suffered. Barclays was down
| for around two days with customers unable to spend money at all.
|
| I suppose had they implemented a similar system, they would have
| degraded into a minimum viable banking system rather than the
| total outage that impacted so many brits.
| mmikeff wrote:
| On the last day that tax payments were due
| QuinnyPig wrote:
| What I wonder is "have they isolated third party dependencies?"
| If AWS is hard down, those may well be impacted--in some cases,
| by their own third party dependencies. You can test turning off
| your AWS environment, but you can't really test turning off S3
| for everyone...
| sleepgou wrote:
| From what I understand of payment systems this is so that
| payments through card machines, contactless payments for public
| transport, cash withdrawals from ATMs, etc. all continue to
| work. A lot of those systems are surprisingly insulated from
| AWS simply by virtue of being extremely archaic
| fujinghg wrote:
| I wouldn't assume that is the case. The failure modes are
| different that is all.
|
| I saw a whole corp POS platform a couple of decades ago that
| was hanging off a TFTP server on a machine that no one dared
| turn off in case the world ended. One day the DC UPS failed,
| it didn't come back up and they had no retail operations for
| several hours while they sent a bunch of cash to a guy who
| had left to help them fix it.
|
| There's stuff like that everywhere lurking in the archaic.
|
| I know of a modem in a DC which is used to talk to a branch
| office running AS400 hardware that is so old they have to buy
| spares off eBay.
| theginger wrote:
| A decent setup which allows you to prove you are not dependent on
| 1 cloud provider will probably pay for itself when it's time to
| negotiate discounts.
| cbg0 wrote:
| I doubt the sales folks you'll be talking to will care about
| your multi cloud deployment, as they don't have the skills to
| verify something like that.
| Koffiepoeder wrote:
| Unrelated tangent: I was reading the article and suddenly
| realised that I could not identify the font. After a quick
| search:
|
| > Our functional typeface is Monzo Sans, a custom cut of
| Universal Sans, meaning it's unique to Monzo. We chose it for
| maximum readability, with generous dots and curled ends.
|
| Intersting choice, but I dig it :)
| tikkabhuna wrote:
| These blog posts are why I continue to support Monzo. Their
| openness is really appreciated.
| joshstrange wrote:
| Completely unrelated to this blog post but I really dislike
| Fintech saying "Get paid early" in their promos.
|
| It's clearly marketing at someone too stupid to be able to see
| right through how utterly useless that is. If you are celebrating
| getting your paycheck 1 day earlier (every time) then your
| financial literally and financial health are probably in the
| toilet. They _must_ know they are preying on people with
| statements like that.
|
| Then again, 90% of Fintech seems to be just a heavy layer of
| lipstick over an archaic system. Often with very little care of
| if any of the tools actually help people and more of a focus on
| how flashy or how much people _think_ they are being helped.
| jkingsman wrote:
| Though, in some cases (like when it's your bank saying it),
| it's usually just them frontrunning reliable (coming from a
| payroll provider) and predictable (getting paid the same time
| each month) ACH transactions with a near-zero likelihood of not
| settling, then crediting you the money before the ACH is
| totally settled, so not ALL cases are fintech gimmicks.
|
| But most are, and unfortunately, as the proliferation of payday
| loans shows us, there is no shortage of desperate people and
| organizations willing to take advantage of that.
| joshstrange wrote:
| > not ALL cases are fintech gimmicks.
|
| Fair and that's all well and good. I'm just saying if 1-3
| days delay of getting your paycheck is going to have a big
| impact on one's life then I encourage one to reexamine their
| decisions, something else is the problem.
| blibble wrote:
| as a banker, when I first heard about that I did I wonder if
| they've modeled that risk correctly
|
| it's the sort of thing that could probably wipe out their
| capital completely in a black swan event
| simonvc wrote:
| It's a risk that was very much understood and it's fully
| covered.
| blibble wrote:
| I've heard that one before
| quesera wrote:
| There's an ocean of historical data to predict reversal or
| settlement failure of ACH transactions.
|
| I would guess that payroll credits are the second most-
| reliable category in the ocean of ACH transactions, right
| after US Treasury payments.
|
| How black would this swan need to be to blow up this
| stability?
| blibble wrote:
| not sure what american payment transfers have to do with
| UK BACS payments, but ok
|
| > I would guess that payroll credits are the second most-
| reliable category in the ocean of ACH transactions, right
| after US Treasury payments.
|
| maybe some sort of lunatic getting control of the US
| treasury payment systems?
|
| I suppose that can't ever happen
| quesera wrote:
| Right, some banks will not post a deposit to your account
| until after a holding period. I deal with a lot of ACH
| payments, and despite a very strict schedule in the network,
| the retail customer-facing side is surprisingly
| unpredictable.
|
| So the "post credit early" promise is not a gimmick, but the
| whole idea of being paid early _is_ a gimmick. The next pay
| period is still a full period away, so any benefit to being
| credited early is literally a one-time, and probably just
| one-day thing.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| Remember that Monzo is a UK institution -- ACH isn't
| relevant, and they _can_ see the payment in flight if it 's
| using BACS.
|
| https://monzo.com/blog/2019/08/20/monzo-now-lets-you-get-
| pai...
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| Really interesting. Would love to understand how they came to the
| decision to build this,and whether there's any precedent for it.
| quesera wrote:
| Payment card networks have delegated authorization plans, where
| if a major processor goes down, they will still route
| transactions and use a simplified secondary network for making
| approval decisions.
|
| It's called "stand-in processing", and I assume it's the
| inspiration here.
| 4ndrewl wrote:
| The Monzo example feels different though, as they're
| explicitly not looking to replicate all functionality, just
| something minimal to get by whilst they fix the primary cloud
| services.
| paulbjensen wrote:
| My only conclusion is that Monzo would rather embrace the
| apocalypse than rely on Microsoft Azure to provide a tertiary
| fallback.
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