Jacob Marks

AWS announced AWS Payment Cryptography is now available in the Asia Pacific (Sydney) Region. You can read the official announcement here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2025/12/aws-payment-cryptography-in-sydney/ This was a particularly difficult launch. Not because of one major issue, but because there were a lot of moving pieces all happening at once. Hardware deployment issues, firmware rollout problems, feature dependencies colliding near the finish line, compliance requirements, launch timing, and the normal reality that things rarely line up as cleanly in practice as they do on a plan. A lot of the work near launch was simply making sure everything that needed to happen actually happened, in the right order, without creating new problems somewhere else. Regional expansion for a service like this is never just turning something on in another place. Every assumption around hardware, operations, and readiness gets tested again. Those are usually the hardest launches. Not...

AWS announced the launch of AWS Payment Cryptography this week, and I’ve had the opportunity to lead the service from its earliest definition through production launch. The official AWS announcement is here: https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2023/06/aws-payment-cryptography/ . This was one of those projects where the hard part was never just building software. The challenge was defining a service that could meet the expectations of payment processors, issuers, and financial institutions who were used to a vastly different interaction model while operating inside the security, compliance, and operational standards required for payment cryptography. My role started at the beginning: taking early customer input, writing the initial business requirements, and helping shape the architecture that would eventually become the service. That meant defining the threat model, establishing the security posture, and making early decisions around control-plane boundaries, data-plane design, ...