Shipt, known for its grocery delivery services, developed a robust distributed payments system to support its operations, including orders on Target's website. The system was designed with multi-region capability from the outset to ensure high availability, using a model where payments function as state machines to manage states like "authorized" and "captured." This approach necessitated careful concurrency control to prevent issues arising from concurrent processes. To address challenges associated with traditional RDBMS setups, such as lag during failovers, Shipt opted for CockroachDB due to its mature, truly distributed nature and the convenience of its managed cloud solution. This decision minimized application complexity by embedding much of the system's intricacy within the database itself, emphasizing the importance of considering data affinity in multi-region applications.