How Flash Sales Improved Our Capacity to Handle Scale
summary
Shopify describes concrete engineering moves: doubling database shards from 10 to >20, adding checkout throttle that queues starting at 100 checkouts/sec, and a load‑tester that drives 75–150× baseline request rates and 14× checkouts to validate fixes. Platform handles ~190M webhooks/day, 150 TB image CDN, and merchants processed ~$15B GMV in a month. New products include Launchpad (automates lock/unlock, publish products, discounts, captcha and rollback) and support for captcha plus the Frenzy app with location Drop Zone events — all reported as deployed and effective.
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