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Shopify

Shopify is a leading global commerce company providing trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere.

Powering millions of businesses in more than 175 countries, the company is mission-driven to empower individual crafters and enterprises alike, ensuring that independent merchants have access to the same world-class technology as global giants.

How They Use Rails

Shopify is the industry’s premier proof that a “Majestic Monolith” can scale to support the global economy. During Black Friday 2025, Shopify’s Rails monolith powered $14.6 billion in merchant sales, handling peak loads of 489 million requests per minute on the edge and over 53 million database queries per second. Rather than fracturing into microservices to handle this volume, Shopify scales its massive codebase, and its 3.1k+ engineers, by treating the development environment as a product.

To maintain this velocity, the team invests heavily in development tooling utilizing Ruby LSP for top-tier editor intelligence, running on Edge Rails to leverage the latest framework features immediately, and using Maintenance Tasks to safely manage complex data backfills and migrations without downtime. Additionally, significant improvements in Ruby performance are achieved through the development of new compilers (such as YJIT and ZJIT) and concurrency primitives, ensuring the monolith remains performant on modern hardware.

In 2022, Shopify became a founding Core member of the Rails Foundation.

Rails has been core to Shopify’s ability to build and ship commerce at massive scale, and we want to help ensure the framework stays a great choice for the next generation of developers. Supporting the Rails community and the Rails Foundation is a practical investment in the health of the ecosystem - better docs, better learning resources, and better community events - so Rails can keep evolving alongside how production systems are actually run today.

Gabi Stefanini Director, Ruby and Rails Infrastructure

Open Source Contributions

Shopify has heavily invested in Ruby and Rails performance, contributing major improvements to both the language and the framework while growing and employing multiple Rails Core team members and Ruby committers. The team created and maintains several open-source gems that support large-scale Rails infrastructure, including maintenance_tasks. Shopify has also pioneered architectural patterns for running Rails at massive scale, particularly through a sharded, pod-based deployment model.

Community Involvement

Shopify plays an active, hands-on role in the Rails community. They employ Rails Core team members and Ruby committers, regularly contribute new features and performance improvements upstream, and maintain open-source tools that many developers rely on. Shopify also sponsors Ruby and Rails organizations, events, tech meetups and research institutions. Their engineers also share what they learn through blog posts, talks, and close collaboration with Rails and Ruby maintainers.

  • Rails World sponsor (multiple years)
  • RailsConf sponsor (multiple years)
  • RubyConf sponsor (multiple years)
  • Tropical on Rails sponsor (multiple years)
  • Ruby Association Platinum Sponsor
  • Ruby Central Ruby Shield sponsor
  • Hosts “Rails at Scale” blog sharing insights from running massive Rails applications
  • Hundreds of conference talks, podcast participation, blog posts
  • Research grants to universities advancing Ruby and Rails theoretical and practical implementations