One platform, three clouds, zero compromises

While Form3 aimed for a cloud-first strategy, connecting to certain payment systems required a blend of on-premises hardware and public cloud infrastructure. By adopting CockroachDB, they designed a deployment architecture centered on operational resilience. This model treats individual cloud providers like standard availability zones in a traditional setup: active, active, active, with zero single points of failure.

Instead of maintaining separate platform replicas on each cloud, which would have created the headache of managing diverging codebases, Form3 operates a single logical platform across AWS, GCP, and Azure simultaneously. Each provider hosts its own managed Kubernetes cluster, kept entirely independent to ensure that a localized failure never triggers a cross-cloud domino effect.

The key to this multi-cloud coordination is private cross-cloud networking. By giving Kubernetes pods unique IP addresses on the VPC host network, Form3 allows pods in different clusters to communicate directly across cloud boundaries. This foundation supports two logical clusters that span all three environments:

• CockroachDB — the write-consistent data layer that guarantees every payment is securely stored with strong consistency, regardless of which cloud it lands in.

• NATS JetStream — a high-performance messaging system that routes asynchronous payment tasks across providers. A transaction can start in GCP and finish in AWS; to the platform, it's all the same.

For the database layer, Form3 deploys nine CockroachDB nodes—one per availability zone within each cloud provider. Using the Raft consensus algorithm, the cluster requires a five-node quorum to remain operational. This allows Form3 to withstand the total failure of a cloud provider (leaving six active nodes) or even lose an additional AZ while maintaining full database availability. You can see a high-level overview of this setup below:

To safeguard this resilience during routine updates, Form3 addressed a limitation in standard Kubernetes. Native PodDisruptionBudgets (PDB) only see the local cluster, meaning multiple clouds could theoretically take a node offline simultaneously. In that state, if a cloud provider also went down, the cloister would drop to just four active nodes below the five-node quorum required to stay online. 

Form3 engineered a custom Cross-Cluster PodDisruptionBudget (X-PDB). This Kubernetes extension coordinates disruptions across all three clusters; if GCP is undergoing a node rollout, AWS is prevented from taking any pods down until GCP is healthy. This ensures at least eight of nine nodes are always active, even during maintenance.

Performance is just as critical as uptime. Form3 manages concurrent traffic of up to 700 TPS while adhering to strict real-time SLAs. CockroachDB's topology-aware features allow them to route requests to the node nearest the customer such as a London node for a UK-based bank while keeping a fully synced replica in a different cloud as a safeguard.

Managing backups across multiple clouds adds another layer of complexity. Form3's RPO requirements demand incremental backups every five minutes. Working closely with the Cockroach Labs engineering team, they developed locality-restricted backups — a feature that enables staggered backups across two clouds simultaneously, so a cloud outage during a backup window never leaves Form3 without a viable restore point.

The cloud outages that didn’t affect customers

Form3 has also survived real-world failures in production. In June of 2025, Google Cloud Platform suffered a massive global disruption triggered by an internal IAM service failure, causing worldwide service interruptions. This became the ultimate test for the architecture and fortunately payment processing remained completely undisturbed. The platform had successfully neutralized a major cloud provider failure in a live environment, performing precisely as the team had envisioned.

In October 2026, Google Cloud suffered another disruption, and once again Form3’s systems stayed online, meaning that their customers remained unaffected. The banks, fintechs, and other companies that run their payments on Form3 were able to keep serving their own customers without interruption.

That continuity is what Form3’s customers are paying for. They chose a managed payments platform so they wouldn’t have to worry about reliability, and so that Form3 would be on the hook to handle any cloud outages. Form3 keeps that promise with their three-cloud platform, built on CockroachDB. “Seeing that work translate into continuity for the businesses that rely on us made me very proud of the team,” says Kevin Holditch, VP of Platform Engineering at Form3.

Built for what comes next

Form3 is on a mission to become the world’s most trusted provider of payment technology. They remove the burden of managing costly, and ever-evolving, critical payment infrastructure from their customers, which allows customer to seamlessly add payment schemes as they expand into new regions. With CockroachDB as a crucial part of their platform’s foundation, Form3 can navigate emerging legislations and continue to grow their business. 

Today, Form3’s API-based cloud technology solutions are entrusted by financial institutions, such as Lloyds Bank, and Nationwide Building Society, for delivering mission-critical payments. For now the majority of Form3’s customers are still based in the UK and the EU. However, they’ve already expanded operations to the US and are looking to enter other international markets — a quickly achievable goal when you're using a single logical database across all three cloud providers.