Case Study: Shopify achieves real-time visibility, instant control, and a 92% cache hit rate with Fastly

Shopify - Customer Case Study

Shopify, a leading cloud-based multi-channel commerce platform powering over 325,000 businesses worldwide, faced limitations with its previous CDN: log delivery was delayed 4–24 hours, troubleshooting and performance testing were slow, and any CDN change required support-engineer intervention. In addition, the lack of origin shielding meant repeated requests from multiple POPs, increasing latency, infrastructure complexity, and costs.

Moving to Fastly gave Shopify real-time dashboards and syslog streaming, Varnish-based custom VCL for instant self-service changes and A/B testing, and Origin Shield to minimize origin requests. The result: a simplified origin stack (eliminating ELB/HAProxy/Varnish), a 92% cache hit rate, faster root-cause analysis, lower latency and costs, and reliable handling of major traffic spikes (including an 18,000% surge for a merchant), plus greater operational control and portability.

Shopify

Dale Neufeld

Director of Technical Operations