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This is a guest repost by Christophe Limpalair, creator of Scale Your Code.
In this article, we take a look at methods used by Shopify to make their platform resilient. Not only is this interesting to read about, but it can also be practical and help you with your own applications.
Shopify's Scaling Challenges
Shopify, an ecommerce solution, handles about 300 million unique visitors a month, but as you'll see, these 300M people don't show up in an evenly distributed fashion.
One of their biggest challenge is what they call "flash sales". These flash sales are when tremendously popular stores sell something at a specific time.
For example, Kanye West might sell new shoes. Combined with Kim Kardashian, they have a following of 50 million people on Twitter alone.
They also have customers who advertise on the Superbowl. Because of this, they have no idea how much traffic to expect. It could be 200,000 people showing up at 3:00 for a special sale that ends within a few hours.
How does Shopify scale to these sudden increases in traffic? Even if they can't scale that well for a particular sale, how can they make sure it doesn't affect other stores? This is what we will discuss in the next sections, after briefly explaining Shopify's architecture for context.
Shopify's Architecture
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