Shopify’s Modular Monolith

In the age of microservices, exploring real-world examples of alternative architectures is really interesting. Today, we'll check Shopify's architecture through an interview with one of its principal engineers.

Why is it interesting? Shopify employs a modular monolith architecture, and their system seamlessly managed peaks of 60 million requests per minute on Black Friday

Key points from the interview:
- Shopify's architecture is based on Ruby on Rails, MySQL, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Memcached\Redis
- Some parts of the system migrated to Rust for better performance
- Certain applications migrated to Vitess for better horizontal data sharding
- Applications are operated within Kubernetes on the Google Cloud platform
- The company actively contributes to open source projects used internally to improve their performance and scaling capabilities
- All shops on the platform are grouped within dedicated sets of database servers to minimize blast radius (the same pattern we saw in Netflix StatefulSet reliability approach)
- The majority of user-facing functionality is served by Shopify Core, a monolith divided into multiple modules focused on different business domains
- Shopify Core can be scaled horizontally so there are no plans to split it on separate services
- New features are rolled out to production using a canary approach

#architecture #scalability #usecase