PREFACE

Across the world, engineering teams are beginning to rethink how payments infrastructure should be built and operated. As enterprises offer richer experiences, support diverse payment methods, and scale across markets, there is growing value in having a payments stack that is transparent, extensible, and fully under their control. This is where a self-hosted payments platform stands apart.

A self-hosted stack offers teams the ability to deeply understand their payment flows, tailor experiences to their business needs, and operate infrastructure with the reliability and scale their customers expect. It enables organizations to design their own workflows, adopt processors on their terms, introduce new capabilities faster, and gain the observability needed to make informed decisions.

Hyperswitch was created with this philosophy at its core:

To enable an open, modular, and accessible payments platform that teams can run, inspect, and extend with confidence.

The Hyperswitch Academy is a structured program built to help merchant teams learn exactly how to do that. It brings together the principles of modern payments engineering with hands-on experience across installation, architecture, payment flows, monitoring, reliability, and production operations.

This book serves as the companion to that program. Each chapter blends conceptual understanding with practical exploration, ensuring that readers not only learn how Hyperswitch works but also why it is designed the way it is. From deploying Hyperswitch locally to navigating its internal components, from observing real-time system behavior to extending the platform with new capabilities, the book aims to build both competence and intuition.

The intent is not to teach Rust or general DevOps fundamentals, but to guide teams in applying those skills effectively within a modern, self-hosted payments system. Readers are expected to be comfortable with Kubernetes, containerized environments, Postgres, Redis, cloud fundamentals, and basic payment concepts.

Ultimately, the goal of the Academy is simple:

To empower teams to confidently build, run, and evolve their own high-performance payments infrastructure, backed by the openness and clarity that Hyperswitch stands for.

Welcome to Hyperswitch Academy. Let’s begin the journey.