How Shopify Prepares for Black Friday

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Note: This article is written in collaboration with the Shopify engineering team. Special thanks to the Shopify engineering team for sharing details with us about their Black Friday Cyber Monday preparation work and also for reviewing the final article before publication. All credit for the technical details shared in this article goes to the Shopify Engineering Team.

Black Friday Cyber Monday (BFCM) 2024 was massive for Shopify. The platform processed 57.3 petabytes of data, handled 10.5 trillion database queries, and peaked at 284 million requests per minute on its edge network. On app servers alone, they handled 80 million requests per minute while pushing 12 terabytes of data every minute on Black Friday.

Here’s the interesting part: this level of traffic is now the baseline for Shopify. And BFCM 2025 was even bigger, serving 90 petabytes of data, handling 1.75 trillion database writes with peak performance at 489 million requests per minute. This is why Shopify rebuilt its entire BFCM readiness program from scratch.

The preparation involved thousands of engineers working for nine months, running five major scale tests.

In this article, we will look at how Shopify prepared for success during the Super Bowl of commerce

The Three-Track Framework

Shopify’s BFCM preparation started in March with a multi-region strategy on Google Cloud.

The engineering team organized the work into three parallel tracks that run simultaneously and influence each other:

• Capacity Planning involves modeling traffic patterns using historical data and merchant growth projections. The team submits these estimates to their cloud providers early so the providers can ensure they have enough physical infrastructure available. This planning defines how much computing power Shopify needs and where it needs to be located geographically.

• The Infrastructure Roadmap is where the team reviews their technology stack, evaluates what architectural changes are needed, and identifies system upgrades required to