Case Study: Shipt achieves highly available, correct distributed payments with Cockroach Labs CockroachDB

How Shipt built a highly available, distributed payment system on CockroachDB

Shipt, a grocery e-commerce and same-day delivery company, needed to build a new distributed payment system that was correct, highly available, and resilient across regions. To support 1–2 million payment transactions per day and avoid manual fixes from payment errors, the team chose Cockroach Labs’ CockroachDB, including the managed CockroachDB Cloud offering, to meet their multi-region, ACID, and replication requirements.

With Cockroach Labs and CockroachDB, Shipt deployed a four-region, highly available architecture using regional table and duplicate index patterns, plus idempotency tokens and locking to enforce correctness and prevent duplicate or ambiguous payment state transitions. The result is a distributed payment platform designed for 99.999% uptime, lower transaction latency through regional routing, and easy horizontal scaling as Shipt grows, with no expected downtime for region changes in production.

Shipt

David Templin

Senior Software Engineer