V8 is Google’s open source high-performance JavaScript and WebAssembly engine written in C++. v8go is a library written in Go and C++ allowing users to execute JavaScript from Go using V8 isolates. Using Cgo bindings allows us to run JavaScript in Go at native performance.

The v8go library, developed by Roger Chapman, aims to provide an idiomatic way for Go developers to interface with V8. As it turns out, this can be tricky. For the past few months, I’ve been contributing to v8go to expose functionality in V8. In particular, I’ve been adding support to expose the V8 CPU Profiler.

We’ve spent a lot of time on performance tuning our Apache Flink application. We’ll walk you through key lessons for optimizing large stateful Apache Flink applications.

How Shopify solved the dependency confusion vulnerability in over 600 Ruby applications and created tailored large-scale migration tooling to make it easier.

In distributed systems, there’s plenty of occasions for things to go wrong. This is why resiliency and redundancy are important. But no matter the systems you put in place, no matter whether you did or didn’t touch your deployments, issues might arise. It makes it critical to acknowledge the near misses: the situations where something could have gone wrong and the situations where something did, but it could have been worse. When was the last time it happened to you? For us, at Shopify, it was on September 30th, 2021, when the expiration of Let’s Encrypt’s (old) root certificate almost led to a global outage of our platform.

The future of commerce is dynamic, contextual, and personalized. Hydrogen is a React-based framework for building custom and creative storefronts powered by Shopify’s platform and APIs.

We reevaluated our existing product categorization model to ensure we’re understanding what our merchants are selling, to build the best products that help power their sales.

Shopify Data built a real-time buyer signal data pipeline to show relevant customer information to merchants while they’re chatting with their customers.

2020 Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) is over, and another BFCM Globe has shipped. We’re extremely proud of the globe, it focused on realism, performance, and the impact our merchants have on the world.

A deep dive into how Shopify Data revamped the data infrastructure powering our BFCM live map using Apache Flink.

In 2015, it was no longer possible to continue buying a larger database server for Shopify. We finally had no choice but to shard the database, which allowed us to horizontally scale our databases and continue our growth. However, what we gained in performance and scalability we lost in resilience.

In 2019 we set out to rewrite the Shopify storefront implementation. Our goal was to make it faster. We talked about the strategies we used to achieve that goal in a previous post about optimizing server-side rendering and implementing efficient caching. To build on that post, I’ll go into detail on how the Storefront Renderer team tweaked our load balancers to shift traffic between the legacy storefront and the new storefront.

Learn how the Database Platform team performed the most recent MySQL upgrade at Shopify and how this changed our upgrade guidelines moving forward.

A deep dive into the latest generation of technology that allows developers to extend Shopify’s UI.

Being the first to build an App Clip in React Native that was going to be surfaced to millions of Shopify's Shop app users each day proved to be a challenging task.

A deep dive into each metric of Google Core Web Vitals.

Data scientists at Shopify expect fast results when querying large datasets across multiple data sources. We use Trino (a distributed SQL query engine) to provide quick access to our data lake and recently, we’ve invested in speeding up our query execution time.

On top of handling over 500 Gbps of data, we strive to deliver p95 query results in five seconds or less. To achieve this, we’re constantly tuning our infrastructure. But with each change comes a risk to our system. A disruptive change could stall the work of our data scientists and interrupt our engineers on call.

That’s why Shopify’s Data Reliability team built custom verification, benchmarking, and profiling tooling for testing and analyzing Trino. Our tooling is designed to minimize the risk of various changes at scale.

Below we’ll walk you through how we developed our tooling. We’ll share simple concepts to use in your own Trino deployment or any other complex system involving frequent iterations.