Cactus | Transaction Processing Monitor

The premise

Mainframes solved this. Then we forgot.

IBM's CICS has processed the world's most critical transactions for 50 years. The ideas were right. The technology was not. Cactus brings mainframe-grade transaction discipline to modern infrastructure — without the mainframe price tag.

Legacy TPMs (CICS, IMS, Tuxedo)

Modern Transaction Monitor

Priority queuing, transaction isolation, and traffic management — rebuilt from scratch in Rust. The principles of mainframe transaction processing, running on commodity hardware at a fraction of the cost.

APM Tools (Datadog, New Relic)

Built-in Cost Attribution

Every transaction is logged with its compute cost at the processing layer — not bolted on after the fact. Know the exact cost of every API call, job, and workflow without a separate observability stack.

Application-layer Security

Unhackable by Architecture

Security that lives in the transaction monitor, not the application. Strict transaction validation, memory-safe execution, and priority isolation mean an attacker cannot corrupt state or starve critical traffic — by design.

Capabilities

Everything your backend demands.

Cactus was built for workloads where failure is not an option — financial systems, critical APIs, real-time infrastructure. Every feature exists because the alternative was not good enough.

100,000+ Transactions Per Second

Native Rust execution with zero GC pauses and no interpreter overhead. Cactus sustains 100k+ TPS on commodity hardware — the kind of throughput that previously required mainframe iron or seven-figure cloud spend.

Priority Traffic Management

Classify every transaction by priority class at submission. The scheduler guarantees that your most critical workloads — payment confirmations, fraud checks, auth — are never delayed by background jobs or low-priority batch processing.

Application Cost Logging

Real compute cost for every transaction — CPU, memory, latency — logged at the monitor level with no sampling. Know exactly what each endpoint, customer, or workflow costs to run. Chargeback, capacity planning, and anomaly detection become trivial.

Unhackable by Architecture

Memory safety from Rust eliminates the entire class of buffer overflow and use-after-free vulnerabilities. Transaction isolation at the monitor level means a compromised transaction cannot corrupt adjacent state. Security is structural, not bolted on.

Your Infrastructure, Your Rules

On-premise, air-gapped, or private cloud. BSD licensed with no usage fees, no telemetry, no vendor lock-in. The transaction monitor your systems run on should be owned by you — not a company that can change the pricing model next quarter.

Use cases

Built for the workloads that cannot fail.

Cactus is for systems where throughput, correctness, and cost visibility are non-negotiable. If your backend is mission-critical, it belongs behind a transaction monitor.

Payment Processing

Every payment is a transaction that must complete exactly once, in the right order, with full cost attribution. Cactus was built for exactly this — guaranteed delivery, no duplicate execution, full audit trail.

Financial Trading

Latency-sensitive order routing and execution where microseconds matter and priority lanes are required. Cactus schedules market-critical traffic ahead of administrative workloads — deterministically, at 100k+ TPS.

Fraud Detection Pipelines

Real-time fraud checks that must complete before a transaction is approved. Priority class guarantees fraud signals are evaluated in the correct order — never delayed by background analytics jobs running on the same infrastructure.

Enterprise API Gateways

High-volume API infrastructure where SLA tiers matter. Route premium customers to priority lanes, log the exact cost of every request, and guarantee that a noisy tenant cannot degrade the experience of others.

Multi-Tenant SaaS Backends

Tenant isolation at the transaction monitor level. Cost logging per tenant enables accurate billing and capacity planning. Priority lanes ensure enterprise customers get the throughput they paid for, even when the platform is under load.

Regulated Infrastructure

Healthcare, defence, and government workloads with strict auditability requirements. Full transaction logs, cost attribution, and deterministic execution provide the paper trail that compliance demands — without a separate audit system.

Mainframes solved this. Then we forgot.

Everything your backend demands.

Built for the workloads that cannot fail.

We'd love to chat.