Shopify’s Modular Monolithic Architecture: A Deep Dive 🛠️
We’re going to explore the fascinating world of Shopify’s Modular Monolithic Architecture.
Shopify is one of the largest e-commerce platforms globally, especially known for handling massive traffic loads during peak events like Cyber Monday and Black Friday. 🚀 We’ll uncover how Shopify manages to handle such high traffic loads, maintain system reliability, and ensure scalability with its robust infrastructure. Let’s dive in!
Overview of Shopify’s Architecture 🏗️
Shopify’s Scale:
- Shopify is a giant in the e-commerce world, handling millions of users and transactions daily. During peak shopping events, like Cyber Monday, the platform experiences enormous traffic.
- The core application, built on Ruby on Rails, has over 2.8 million lines of code and 500,000 commits. This illustrates the massive scale and complexity of their system. 📈
Need for Modularity:
- As Shopify’s application grew, so did its complexity and feature set, making it increasingly difficult to manage. To address this, Shopify’s engineering team decided to make their Rails monolith more modular.
- Over the past few years, they’ve been working on breaking down the monolith into smaller, independent units of code known as components. These components focus on specific business domains and operate more independently, making the overall system easier to manage and scale. 🧩
Shopify has been quite transparent about its architectural journey. They have published insightful articles on how they are evolving their architecture to maximize developer productivity and maintain system efficiency:
- Deconstructing the Monolith: Designing Software that Maximizes Developer Productivity
- Under Deconstruction: The State of Shopify’s Monolith
These resources are a goldmine if you want to understand their architectural evolution in more detail! 🌟
Shopify’s Engineering Tweet 🐦
During Black Friday, Shopify’s infrastructure is put to the test with an immense traffic load. Shopify Engineering tweeted about how they scaled to handle this massive influx of users and transactions.
This impressive feat showcases the efficiency and resilience of Shopify’s architecture. 💪 For more details, check out the reddit discussion.
Pragmatic Approach to Infrastructure 🛠️
Shopify’s Philosophy:
- Shopify’s infrastructure is built on simplicity and pragmatism. Guided by founder and CEO Tobi Lütke, the team focuses on simplifying processes whenever possible. 🧘♂️
- Instead of over-complicating things, they stick to widely-known technologies and scale them horizontally to handle the load. This approach ensures that the system remains robust and efficient.
Core Components:
- Shopify leverages technologies like Ruby, Rails, MySQL/Vitess, Memcached/Redis, Kafka, and Elasticsearch. These technologies are well-known in the industry and have proven scalability.
- Shopify employs experts in these technologies who not only ensure optimal performance but also contribute to open-source projects, further enhancing these components’ scalability and reliability. 🧑💻
Shopify’s Tech Stack 🔧
Shopify’s tech stack is designed for scalability and responsiveness:
- Ruby on Rails: The core applications run on Ruby on Rails using Puma as the web server.
- Memcached: Used for ephemeral storage to improve performance.
- Elasticsearch: Handles full-text search capabilities, making it easier to manage vast amounts of data.
- Nginx + Lua: Provides routing, rate limiting, and abuse protection.
- Kubernetes on Google Cloud: Ensures that the platform can scale efficiently and remain responsive under heavy load. ☁️
Embracing the Majestic Monolith 🏰
Shopify Core:
- Shopify Core is the main application, and it’s a single large Ruby on Rails monolith. But don’t be fooled by the term “monolith” — internally, it’s split into multiple components focused on different business domains.
- Instead of breaking the monolith into microservices, Shopify fully embraces the idea of a Majestic Monolith. This approach allows them to maintain all user-facing functionality within a single, large application, while internally organizing the codebase into modular components. 🧱
Internal Components:
- The internal structure of Shopify’s monolith consists of multiple components, each focusing on a specific business domain. Many custom tools have been built to enforce coding standards and maintain API boundaries between these components. This ensures that each component is robust, well-defined, and independent from the others. 🔍
Testing and Deployments 🧪🚀
Multi-layered Testing:
- Shopify employs a multi-layered testing approach. It starts with unit and integration tests to ensure that each component works correctly.
- During deployment, canary testing is used. Changes are first deployed to a small subset of production instances, allowing the team to monitor and ensure everything works smoothly before a full rollout.
Conclusion: The Power of Shopify’s Modular Monolithic Architecture 🌟
In summary, Shopify’s Modular Monolithic Architecture demonstrates that with the right approach, it’s possible to build a scalable, efficient, and maintainable system that meets the demands of modern e-commerce. Whether you’re building a new application or looking to evolve your existing architecture, the lessons from Shopify’s approach can help guide your decisions and ensure long-term success. 🚀
This is step-by-step development of reference Modular Monoltihs Architecture on .NET used ASP.NET Web API, Docker, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, Keycloak, Seq, MassTransit, Entity Framework Core, CQRS, MediatR, DDD, Vertical Slice Architecture and Outbox Pattern implementation with using latest features of .NET 8 and C# 12.
