How We Scaled Our Payment Processing Platform to 50 Million Daily Transactions with Conductor

How We Scaled Our Payment Processing Platform to 14 Million Daily Transactions with Conductor TL;DR: We ripped out a gnarly homegrown orchestration layer and replaced it with Conductor OSS, validated it locally, then moved to Orkes to handle 14M+ daily credit card transactions across sync and async workflows. MTTR went from 6.5 hours to under 3 minutes. We stopped dreading deployments. And we finally — finally — have one place to debug transaction flows that touch 27+ major services, a bunch of smaller ones, and multiple message queues. This is the story of how we got here and what we learned along the way. The System We Inherited (and Its Scars) If you've ever built payment infrastructure, you know the drill. A credit card transaction looks simple from the outside — swipe, approve, done. Under the hood, it's a distributed systems nightmare that will absolutely ruin your weekend. Our platform processes credit card authorizations, settlements, chargebacks, refunds, and batch reconciliat