Shopify modular monolith scaled to 30 TB per minute during Cyber Monday

[vladmihalcea]

Shopify uses a modular monolith architecture built with Ruby on Rails and MySQL.

2021 was their biggest Black Friday Cyber Monday Together with the Google Cloud infrastructure team, they achieved near-perfect uptime while averaging ~30TB/min of egress traffic across our infrastructure. That’s a massive ~43PB/day!

Here are some of the most interesting stats

https://twitter.com/ShopifyEng/status/1465806691543531525

[codegeek]

Show this to everyone who shits on monolith and only wants to build a scalable serverless microservices whatever.

[cardosof]

Some people just want to build CVs, not products.

[dmlittle]

A service oriented architecture is not a bad thing. It has its benefits as well as it’s downsides. The key is to know when to use the pattern and when not to.

I’m not sure what exactly “modular monolith” means but I’m guessing it’s some kind of mono repo with different services that share a large core but can scale independently. At Shopify’s scale I doubt you can just use a single service and database and not run into problems (both technical and development productivity wise).

[speedgoose]

The secret is to build scalable monoliths. You probably need a few microservices to achieve that at this scale.

[10000truths]

The secret is keeping performance in mind throughout your whole tech stack and in your application code. Do that, and you might not even need to scale beyond a couple machines for redundancy, depending on your SLOs.

I’ve said this a couple times before, but it bears repeating - nginx can easily serve a million 1 kB static files per second over TLS from just one machine with a modern Xeon/EPYC CPU. Serving dynamic content doesn’t have to perform any worse than one or two orders of magnitude below that.

[jlgaddis]

> ... averaging ~30TB/min of egress traffic ...

That's 4 Tbps after converting to units that everyone else in the world uses for network traffic (assuming the calculator installed atop my neck is operating bug-free this soon after booting up today).

[ksec]

Not trying to downplay those results and achievements.

But do each store front get their own instance of both Database and the App? If that is the case isn't that equivalent to running millions of Wordpress instances?

I think I asked this before but I forgot what the answer was.

[kello]

Does github still use Rails in a sort of monolith? I like examples of "monoliths" in the wild that gasp scale as well / better than dozens of microservices painfully working together just to show me a metrics dashboard. Dont get me wrong, not against microservices, it's just that more often than not such architectures have brought more pain than good in my career. I will most of the time gladly trade the overhead of maintaining/managing microservice-glue-infrastructure for a large modular monolith.

[dyeje]

RaIlS doEsn'T ScAlE.

[andrewdubinsky]

That's impressive.

[yuppie_scum]

Near perfect