Building Shopify's PaaS on Kubernetes

Shopify has grown from less than 20 production services in 2011 to more than 400 in 2017. These services currently run on a wide variety of production environments making it harder to share tools across applications. Moving to the cloud is a common occurrence but Shopify decided to build a platform as a service (PaaS) to consolidate all production environments. This PaaS was built on a public cloud provider and Kubernetes (k8s). Despite consolidation, the PaaS added maintenance and support load on the team. SREs' build tools that are used by developers with a wide array of experience which adds challenges regarding user experience, education, support etc.

This talk contains a brief overview of development at Shopify, why we decided to move to the cloud, what we built and what was learned along the way. This talk is not meant to be a technical introduction into how to use Kubernetes, but instead a case study regarding the team’s experiences building the PaaS. Issues regarding onboarding, education etc are similar to issues faced in most SRE projects. The case study is meant to generalize the lessons the team learnt over the project and how they can applied more broadly at other organizations.