Web Design: E-Commerce at Scale: Inside Shopify's Tech Stack

Wednesday, August 15, 2018

E-Commerce at Scale: Inside Shopify's Tech Stack

#179 — August 15, 2018

Hi folks!

We're finding an increasing number of stories from companies who are changing stacks, making their existing stacks more efficient, or building interesting tools and services. Each week we try to share as many of these stories as we can, and this week is packed with them, so don't forget to check out the 'Stories & Opinions' section further down the newsletter if you don't usually make it that far :-)

— Peter Cooper, editor

E-Commerce at Scale: Inside Shopify's Tech Stack — Shopify provides ecommerce services for over 600K sites - here's how they keep their system running at over 80K requests per second while running on Ruby on Rails, a system not usually known for its speed, and MySQL.

Shopify Engineering

Beyond Web and Worker: Evolution of the Modern Web App on Heroku — As one of the longest running webapp platform services, Heroku has had to evolve alongside app development and deployment practices and this is the first in a series of posts digging into what's changed.

Heroku

See why Facebook, Spotify, & Sony Trust CircleCI With Their CI/CD — Automate the software development process using continuous integration and continuous delivery so you can focus on what matters: building great things, not waiting for great things to build.

CircleCI sponsor

How The New York Times Built a Serverless Email Platform — The NYT sends 4 billion emails a year and recently rebuilt its email platform from scratch in a serverless style to run on Google Cloud Platform.

The Times Open Team

Passive Observations of a Large DNS Service — Summaries from a paper that digs into what we can learn from 3.5 billion queries to Google's public DNS service, including that it's now harder for CDNs to determine where clients are located so there's a new standard proposed to help fix that.

Wouter de Vries (University of Twente)

Automated Infrastructure Cost Optimization at Scale with EC2 — Quora's infrastructure team shares some cost optimizations they've made for running their systems on EC2 Reserved Instances.

Charley Witchakorn Kamolpornwijit (Quora)

Google Public DNS Turns 8.8.8.8 Years Old — I seriously can't believe Google's public DNS service is almost nine years old, but there you go.

Google

Amazon Aurora Serverless MySQL Generally Available — AWS now offers serverless scaling and billing flexibility to users of its MySQL-compatible Aurora database service.

Randall Hunt (Amazon)

ec2-price-check: A CLI Tool to Quickly Check EC2 Pricing — ec2instances.info is a Web-based alternative in this space, if you prefer.

Bjorn Stange

💻 Jobs

DevOps Engineer (Fully Remote) — We asked our DevOps Engineer to come up with recruitment clickbait. He said "Kubernetes".

Hotjar

Find A WebOps Job Through Vettery — Vettery specializes in dev roles and is completely free for job seekers. Create a profile to get started.

Vettery

📘 Tutorials

Building Optimized Containers for Kubernetes

Justin Ellingwood

Kubernetes: Building Docker Images Within a Cluster — Using kaniko, a tool written in Go that builds container images from Dockerfiles – without using Docker.

Jan-Hendrik Grundhöfer

Get to Know Helm, The Official Package Manager for Kubernetes

DigitalOcean sponsor

Selecting the Right Database for Your Microservices

Roshan Kumar

Six Security Considerations for Serverless Environments — Don't forget our serverless newsletter if you're now working with serverless architectures.

Gadi Naor

▶ Next Gen Networking Infrastructure with Rust — How Rust's 'zero cost abstractions' are are used in Linkerd, a service mesh proxy for cloud apps.

Carl Lerche

💬 Stories & Opinions

Building a Distributed Rate Limiter That Scales Horizontally

Simon Woolf

How to Crash an Email Server with a Single Email

Snyk

How Walmart Built a Robust Analytics Platform on Spark, Kafka and Cassandra

Rishi Saraf (Walmart Labs)

Experiences Using Micro Frontends at IKEA — IKEA's organizes around multiple teams of 10-12 developers each able to deploy autonomously.

InfoQ

Adopting a Serverless Approach at Bazaarvoice with MongoDB Atlas and AWS Lambda — They moved from a monolithic Django app hosted on EC2 to using serverless functions and MongoDB's hosted Atlas platform.

Peter Zawistowicz (MongoDB)

Application Security for Kubernetes Microservices

Bluefyre sponsor

Google Explains Why Others Are Doing SRE Wrong

Manuel Pais (InfoQ)