Engineering a Historic Moment: Shopify Gets Ready for Cannabis in Canada - Shopify

This post details the creation of a new regional instance of Shopify in Montreal to meet the strict requirements for the newly regulated Canadian cannabis industry. This involved building new Google Cloud Platform projects, including PCI compliant payment processing infrastructure and a regional data warehouse. The core infrastructure, running on GKE and GCE, was extended to a new region using Terraform for infrastructure declaration and configuration. Improved resiliency features like regional clusters and segregated compute node clusters were utilized to minimize the 'noisy neighbour problem'. Significant effort was also put into ensuring personal information remained within Canada by implementing multiple layers of protection at the application, host, and network/infrastructure levels, including network request verification, strict firewall rules, minimal secrets deployment, and unique SSL certificates. Load testing and game days were conducted to ensure scalability and resilience for launch day.