An Insider's Look at the Technology That Powers Shopify
Watched this talk because I thought it was more software architecture related but it turned out to be a very general and high level overview on 4 areas of Shopify's technology. Lots of cool Silk Road. economical, and historical references though.
Payments
- Joined W3C in 2016 as a founding member of the payments working group, to standardize payment actions on the internet for 3 years+.
- Principles:
- "Do you have a wallet?"
- "Can you make a payment?"
- "Let's make it fast."
3D Models
- Shopify is working with the Khronos Group (an open standards body) to advance 3D model formats for the internet.
- A merchant's data belongs to the merchant.
- "We have the tools to support you, but you have to use them".
- The biggest threat to a merchant's data is compromised credentials, mainly from phishing emails.
- One account and one setting for everything you do on Shopify.
- Allows Shopify servers to interact with secure identity meechanisms on devices (TouchID, Windows Hello, etc.)
- Additional support on data ownership and privacy through new webhooks and APIs
- Data request and deletion API.
- Greater app permission transparency.
- Ranking and monitoring apps on Shopify platform to make sure that their partners are building applications that respect data on behalf of the merchant.
- Processing more than 10 billion events everyday, which totals to 10 petabytes of data.
- Network of 3000+ security engineers who have been paid out more than 1 million USD to find and report vulnerabilities (on test shops).
- Providing unique products and experience is a key product to make commerce exciting and enjoyable.
- Guided by the philosophy of The Silk Road.
- 5 years ago Shopify API had lag between announcing APIs and features.
- As of this talk, Shopify is powered by the same REST and GraphQL APIs used by clients. No lag between feature announcements and API announcements anymore.
- New PoS is being built with apps as a core feature built into the experience.
- APIs are features.
- Comitting to building as many APIs they can to keep Shopify the most creative platform for commerce experiences.
- Scaled from 2 points of presence to 180 in over 80 countries in a single year. Decreasing latency for buyers by 30% - 50%.
- Launching 4 new regions in next 18 months from this talk's date.
- Requests reach around 5 million per minute.
- Some merchants are selling more than 8000 orders a minute.
- Speed matters more than scale for most merchants.
- Two big performance wins:
- Upgrade to image delivery service by using WebP (30% smaller and faster).
- New Liquid renderer that's 7x faster.
Last modified 3yr ago