---
title: "Shopify’s Infrastructure Collaboration with Google"
description: "Shopify announces that it is building its Cloud with Google after more than a decade of operating the foundation of its commerce cloud through its own data centers and incremental public-cloud adoption. Its infrastructure evolved from database and application sharding, performance testing, automated failovers, and Docker-based immutable infrastructure toward Kubernetes orchestration, after the company initially built minimal container-management features itself. During the migration, Shopify created Shop Mover, a selective database migration tool that rebalances shops between shards with an average of 2.5s downtime per shop, and moved more than 50% of data-center workloads to Google Cloud. It also grew to more than 400 production services, consolidated them on Kubernetes through a platform-as-a-service, and contributed to and used Grafeas for software supply-chain auditing and governance."
---

# Shopify’s Infrastructure Collaboration with Google

[Shopify](https://yomu.fyi/company/shopify) · Dale Neufeld · Mar 26, 2018

**Type:** Announcement

## Summary

Shopify announces that it is building its Cloud with Google after more than a decade of operating the foundation of its commerce cloud through its own data centers and incremental public-cloud adoption. Its infrastructure evolved from database and application sharding, performance testing, automated failovers, and Docker-based immutable infrastructure toward Kubernetes orchestration, after the company initially built minimal container-management features itself. During the migration, Shopify created Shop Mover, a selective database migration tool that rebalances shops between shards with an average of 2.5s downtime per shop, and moved more than 50% of data-center workloads to Google Cloud. It also grew to more than 400 production services, consolidated them on Kubernetes through a platform-as-a-service, and contributed to and used Grafeas for software supply-chain auditing and governance.

## Context

Shopify describes its progression from a Rails monolith and company-operated data centers toward broader cloud adoption. Earlier infrastructure work included database sharding, application sharding, production load testing, automated failovers, and Docker adoption, while Kubernetes emerged as the preferred orchestration solution.

## Approach / What changed

Shopify partnered with Google Cloud, migrated workloads incrementally, and built Shop Mover to rebalance shops between database shards. It consolidated more than 400 production services on Kubernetes through a platform as a service, while contributing to and leveraging Grafeas for software supply-chain auditing and governance.

## Takeaways

- Shop Mover rebalances shops between database shards and achieves an average of 2.5 seconds of downtime per shop.
- Shopify moved more than 50% of its data-center workloads to Google Cloud and consolidated over 400 production services on Kubernetes.
- Shopify adopted Docker for immutable infrastructure, then moved toward Kubernetes after initially building minimal container-management features as the ecosystem matured.

## FAQ

### How does Shopify move shops between database shards during the migration?

Shopify built Shop Mover, a selective database data migration tool that rebalances shops between database shards. The stated average downtime per shop is 2.5 seconds.

### Why did Shopify choose Kubernetes for orchestration?

Shopify identified Kubernetes as the most promising orchestration development after building minimal container-management features when the Docker ecosystem was still immature. Kubernetes was created by teams at Google that built Borg and Google Kubernetes Engine.

### How much of Shopify’s infrastructure had moved to Google Cloud?

Shopify reported migrating more than 50% of its data-center workloads to Google Cloud at the time of the announcement. The migration was still continuing.

**Tags:** [Cloud](https://yomu.fyi/topic/cloud), [Docker](https://yomu.fyi/topic/docker), [Grafeas](https://yomu.fyi/topic/grafeas), [Kubernetes](https://yomu.fyi/topic/kubernetes)

- Source: [Shopify](https://shopify.engineering/shopify-infrastructure-collaboration-with-google)
- Source URL: https://shopify.engineering/shopify-infrastructure-collaboration-with-google
- Ingested by Yomu: 2026-09-17T14:13:02.176Z

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