Availability and reliability are paramount for all web applications and APIs. If you’re providing an API, chances are you’ve already experienced sudden increases in traffic that affect the quality of your service, potentially even leading to a service outage for all your users.

The first few times this happens, it’s reasonable to just add more capacity to your infrastructure to accommodate user growth. However, when you’re running a production API, not only do you have to make it robust with techniques like idempotency, you also need to build for scale and ensure that one bad actor can’t accidentally or deliberately affect its availability.

We built Stripe Atlas to help entrepreneurs from all over the globe start and run an internet business, no matter which industry they're in, where they're based, or their gender or ethnicity. However, women are still not starting companies or raising money at nearly the same rate as men—women made up only 7% of founders whose companies received more than $20M in VC funding between 2009 and 2015. We believe that a more diverse entrepreneurial ecosystem leads to better products and services for everyone.

Today, we're expanding the number of currencies that Canadian businesses on Stripe can accept. In the past, Canadian companies could accept only payments in U.S. or Canadian dollars; starting today, you can charge in any of more than 130 currencies. As you'd expect, we'll automatically convert and transfer funds in either CAD or USD.

The networks connecting our servers are, on average, more reliable than consumer-level last miles like cellular or home ISPs, but given enough information moving across the wire, they’re still going to fail in exotic ways. Outages, routing problems, and other intermittent failures may be statistically unusual on the whole, but still bound to be happening all the time at some ambient background rate.

To overcome this sort of inherently unreliable environment, it’s important to design APIs and clients that will be robust in the event of failure, and will predictably bring a complex integration to a consistent state despite them. Let’s take a look at a few ways to do that.

Engineering teams face a common challenge when building software: they eventually need to redesign the data models they use to support clean abstractions and more complex features. In production environments, this might mean migrating millions of active objects and refactoring thousands of lines of code.

Stripe users expect availability and consistency from our API. This means that when we do migrations, we need to be extra careful: objects stored in our systems need to have accurate values, and Stripe’s services need to remain available at all times.

In this post, we’ll explain how we safely did one large migration of our hundreds of millions of Subscriptions objects.

We're excited to launch a few features today that make it much easier to manage your subscriptions from the Dashboard. One of the most common pieces of feedback we've heard from our users is that it was challenging to support business models where customers are commonly subscribed to multiple plans (such as those with "add on" features). You can now create subscriptions that are composed of multiple plans, which lets you use Stripe to better represent the business model of many subscriptions businesses.

Starting a business is hard. Some of the difficulty is intrinsic—making products and services then convincing customers to pay for them will always be a challenge. Some of the difficulty is unnecessary—access to the infrastructure and tools for starting up an internet business is not evenly distributed.

We just launched version 1.1.0 of our Android SDK, which fixes a few bugs and adds some new features: threading control, brand instead of type for cards, look up a card’s funding source, and Javadoc.

When people talk about their data infrastructure, they tend to focus on the technologies. However, we’ve found that just as important as the technologies themselves are the principles that guide their use. Here's our experience with one such principle that we’ve found useful: reproducibility.

With so many new technologies coming out every year (like Kubernetes or Habitat), it’s easy to become so entangled in our excitement about the future that we forget to pay homage to the tools that have been quietly supporting our production environments. One such tool we've been using at Stripe for several years now is Consul. Consul helps discover services (that is, it helps us navigate the thousands of servers we run with various services running on them and tells us which ones are up and available for use). This effective and practical architectural choice wasn't flashy or entirely novel, but has served us dutifully in our continued mission to provide reliable service to our users around the world.

Stripe Radar is a collection of tools to help businesses detect and prevent fraud. At Radar’s core is a machine learning engine that scans every card payment across Stripe’s 100,000+ businesses, aggregates information from those payments into behavioral signals that are predictive of fraud, and blocks payments that have a high probability of being fraudulent. Here's how we use machine learning to detect and prevent fraud.

When a company writes about their observability stack, they often focus on sweet visualizations, advanced anomaly detection or innovative data stores. Those are well and good, but today we’d like to talk about the tip of the spear when it comes to observing your systems: metrics pipelines! Metrics pipelines are how we get metrics from where they happen—our hosts and services—to storage quickly and efficiently so they can be queried, all without interrupting the host service.

Today, we’re excited to fully launch Stripe to all Singaporean businesses—any entrepreneur in Singapore can now instantly start accepting payments.

Starting today, marketplaces using Stripe Connect can send Instant Payouts to sellers or service providers on their platform. To start, it’ll be available to marketplaces in the U.S. using Managed Accounts.

Apple Pay on the Web will be available later this fall. (Apple has not yet published an exact date.) We’ve received a lot of questions about how the integration will work and we’ve been working closely with Apple to ensure that the implementation will be quick and easy for Stripe users.

We’re building business infrastructure. As with other kinds of infrastructure (like hosting or electricity), we'd like to make it available to as broad a set of users as possible. While we may personally like some businesses on Stripe and disapprove of others, we want to make as few judgements as possible as a company. The world doesn’t need more gatekeepers.

Today, we’re thrilled to launch Managed Accounts for Stripe Connect to marketplaces based in the U.K., Ireland, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and Norway.

We’ve added reusable UI components in our latest iOS SDK that make it easy to accept both Apple Pay and regular credit card payments through a single, unified integration. The UI library supports automatically detecting Apple Pay, storing cards for future use, and custom styling. We hope these prebuilt components drastically reduce the time needed to create beautiful, high-conversion iOS checkout flows.

We announced Atlas a few months ago and we’re so excited by the amount of interest we’ve already received. Since launching the beta, over 440 startups from 91 countries are already using Atlas to get up and running with Stripe. More broadly, we’ve received applications from entrepreneurs in almost every country.

In the past year, we’ve added deeper support for representing products and orders to the core Stripe API. By working with products and orders, we can start to remove a lot of the unnecessary complexity that companies currently deal with—manually calculating taxes, figuring out shipping costs, or even just keeping product and inventory data in sync with all their systems.