UPI feels magical: instant payments, 24×7, across banks, with reliability that rivals any global real-time payment network. But behind this magic is an ecosystem built heavily on open-source technologies, open standards, and vendor-neutral protocols. This talk takes a deep dive into how UPI works under the hood: distributed queues, API gateways, authentication rails, open cryptographic standards, switching systems, and reliability engineering.
We explore how banks and PSPs depend on OSS components such as Linux, Java, Postgres, Kafka, HSM libraries, OpenJDK crypto, Kubernetes, and more to process millions of transactions per second. We also look at how NCPI's open API specifications foster interoperability across apps like PhonePe, Google Pay, Paytm, and bank apps.
This is a behind-the-scenes journey into the world of digital payments in India, engineered using scalable, resilient open-source software.
Understand how UPI works technically : protocol flow, settlement, gateways, switching.
How major UPI components rely on FOSS
Performance & reliability patterns inspired by OSS systems.
Why openness and standardization enabled UPI’s explosive growth.
Lessons OSS-driven systems can apply from UPI’s success.