Rollback plan
- 1. Implement a multi-gateway architecture
To avoid a total payment outage, your system should be able to route transactions through multiple gateways. If you are migrating from an existing gateway, keep that gateway fully operational as a fallback option.
Smart routing: Configure a rule-based engine to send a percentage of transactions to the new PayU gateway. This allows you to monitor performance in a live environment without a full-scale migration.
Automated failover: Implement logic to automatically detect a performance degradation in the PayU gateway (e.g., increased latency, higher error rates) and reroute 100% of traffic to the previous or an alternative gateway.
- 2. Define clear rollback triggers
Establish specific, measurable thresholds that, if crossed, automatically or manually trigger a rollback to the previous payment system.
Transaction success rate: A drop of more than 2% in the payment success rate over a 10-minute period.
Gateway response time: An average response time increase of more than 500ms for a sustained period.
Error rate: A spike in 5xx HTTP errors or specific PayU-related decline codes.
Customer complaints: A sudden increase in support tickets mentioning payment failures.
- 3. Create a rollback procedure
A step-by-step guide is critical to a swift and clean rollback.
- Stop new PayU traffic: Immediately stop all new traffic from being routed to PayU by updating the smart routing configuration.
- Verify fallback system: Confirm that the failover to the existing gateway is working correctly and processing new transactions without issue.
- Deploy a hotfix (if necessary): If the regression was caused by a specific code change, prepare a hotfix for a quick redeployment.
- Monitor fallback performance: Continue monitoring the previous gateway to ensure it can handle the full volume of traffic.
- Perform root cause analysis: After the immediate crisis is averted, conduct a post-mortem to determine the precise cause of the performance regression.
Communications plan
The communications plan should be transparent, timely, and empathetic. Pre-drafted messages and a clear escalation path will save critical time during an incident.
Notification: Establish an automated alert system (e.g., Slack or email) to notify key internal teams immediately when a rollback is triggered.
Incident team: Define an incident response team including a communications manager, technical lead, and customer support lead.
Internal status page: Maintain an internal status page to keep all employees informed of the incident status without distracting the technical team.
Acknowledge the issue: If the performance regression significantly affects customers, use multiple channels to acknowledge the problem quickly.
Focus on customer impact: Translate technical issues into language that customers understand. Avoid jargon like gateway timeout and instead say, Some customers may be experiencing failed payments