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Internal Hosting Platform (Quick)

1 post · Nov 2014 – Jun 2026

What this trail covers

Shopify has developed and enhanced Quick, an internal platform for hosting static sites and providing backend services. Initially launched in July 2025, Quick allows employees to deploy folders of HTML and assets, receiving a secure URL accessible only to Shopify employees. It has since evolved to offer integrated backend services including a database, AI capabilities, file storage, data warehouse access, WebSockets, and an identity API. The platform has seen massive adoption, hosting over 50,000 sites and enabling AI-assisted site creation and sharing. The platform's philosophy emphasizes simplicity and embracing constraints, with a single VM supporting over 50,000 sites. Maintenance involves rate limiting for database usage and migration from Node.js to Go for improved memory management and parallelism. Quick fosters an emergent ecosystem of shared JS libraries and landing pages, with a focus on internal trust enabling features like open guestbooks and leaderboards without spam concerns.

All Shopify trails
  1. Quick: An internal hosting platform for the AI era (2026) - ShopifyThis post details the evolution of Shopify's internal hosting platform, Quick. It describes the initial architecture using Google Cloud Storage, gcsfuse, NGINX, and Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP) for serving static sites. The platform was extended with backend services including a CloudSQL database, AI proxy for LLM calls, file uploads, data warehouse access, WebSockets, and an Identity API. The post highlights the adoption driven by AI-assisted site generation and the emergence of an internal ecosystem with shared JS libraries. It also discusses the platform's philosophy of simplicity and constraints, its maintenance on a single VM, and the migration from Node.js to Go for improved performance. Rate limiting practices were implemented to handle database abuse.
  2. Shopify’s Infrastructure Collaboration with Google - ShopifyThis post announces Shopify's strategic decision to build its cloud infrastructure with Google Cloud Platform (GCP), specifically leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE). It details the journey from self-managed infrastructure and early cloud adoption to a comprehensive migration strategy. Key technical contributions and outcomes include: migrating over 50% of data center workloads to GCP, building a Platform as a Service (PaaS) on Kubernetes to consolidate production services, and contributing to Google's open-source initiative Grafeas for container auditing and governance. The post also mentions the development of a 'Shop Mover' tool for database data migration and participation in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
  3. Docker at Shopify: How We Built Containers that Power Over 100,000 Online Shops - ShopifyThis post details the initial development of Shopify's containerization strategy using Docker. It outlines the motivation for containerization, the bootstrapping process, the choice of 'thin' containers, and the environment setup using Chef and Dockerfiles. Key contributions include the '100 rule' for shared services (log indexing, statistics, Kafka) and conventions for containerizing applications (code layout, git repos, compile phase). Debugging techniques using `nsenter` and `docker exec` are also introduced.