Tobi Lutke wrote the first line of code for Shopify nearly 10 years ago to power his own Snowboard shop. Two years later Shopify launched to the public on a single webserver using Rails 0.13.1. Today Shopify powers over 40k online stores and processes up to half a million product sales per day across the platform. Over 30 people actively work on Shopify which makes it the longest developed and likely largest Rails code base out there.

This is the story of how Shopify has evolved to handle its immense growth over the years. This is what getting big is all about: evolving to meet the needs of your customers. You don't start out with a system and infrastructure that can handle a billion dollar in GMV. You evolve to it. You evolve by adding caching layers, hardware, queuing systems and splitting your application to services.

This is the story of how we have tackled the various scaling pain points that Shopify has hit and what we have done to surpass them, what we are doing to go even further.