Shopify's Architecture to handle 80K RPS Celebrity Sales

GOTO Copenhagen 2017

What do you do when some of the most ubiquitous celebrity personalities launch products on your platform, driving tens of thousands of requests per second? You pull up your sleeves and architect for it. Throughout the past decade, Shopify's infrastructure has evolved to serve some of the largest online sales on the planet. In this talk, we dive into our multi-tenant architecture that allows us to failover between regions with zero downtime, move shops between shards, minimize the blast radius of catastrophes, as well as throttling and serving cache hits out of the load-balancers. We'll walk through how this architecture served us beautifully to minimize risk during our on-going, gradual migration to the Cloud.