Canada-based e-commerce platform provider Shopify has selected Google to help it host the e-commerce sites it builds, customizes and maintains for its more than 600,000 merchant clients.
“After 12 years of building and running the foundation of our own commerce cloud with our own data centers, we are excited to build our cloud with Google,” Dale Neufeld, vice president of production engineering, wrote in a blog post.
Shopify was using Amazon Web Services for some of its cloud infrastructure. Shopify will still use Amazon for some cloud services, but the majority will now be run by Google, a spokeswoman for Shopify confirmed.
Shopify is still in the process of making the switch, but it has migrated more than 50% of its data center workloads, and counting, to Google Cloud, Neufeld writes. Shopify says that the company will have more to share about the move when the migration is complete.
Shopify is another in a growing list of large companies that have selected Google or Microsoft instead of Amazon.com Inc. for cloud services, according to Bloomberg—including Home Depot Inc. and Williams-Sonoma Inc.—in part because the companies deem Amazon as a competitor, Bloomberg reports.
Amazon.com is No. 1 in the Internet Retailer 2017 Top 1000. Home Depot is No. 8, and Williams Sonoma is No. 23. Shopify ranks No. 6 among e-commerce platform providers to merchants in the Top 1000 with 22 Top 1000 clients.
As Google seeks to attract more customers to its lucrative cloud business, it’s been opening up access to tools for its clients that before were used only by Google internally. For example, just this week, Google announced performance management tools for its cloud customers, including Stackdriver Profiler, that until today were available only to Google employees.
“Here at Google, we’re developers too, and we know that tracking down performance problems in your code can be hard—particularly if the application is live,” Morgan McLean, product manager at Google writes in a Google Cloud Platform blog post. “Today, we’re announcing new products that offer the same Application Performance Management (APM) capabilities that we use internally to monitor and tune the performance of our own applications. These tools are powerful, can be used on applications running anywhere and are priced so that virtually any developer can make use of them.”
The foundation of the performance management tools are two existing products, Stackdriver Trace and Debugger, which already are helping organizations analyze and debug applications while they’re running, without impacting user experience, McLean says.
On top of those tools, Google is releasing to the public Stackdriver Profiler, which lets its cloud customers profile and explore how code executes in production, to optimize performance and reduce costs. Production profiling is “immensely powerful,” and lets companies gauge the impact of any function or line of code on an application’s overall performance, McLean says.
“At Google, we continuously profile our applications to identify inefficiently written code, and these tools are used every day across the company.”
Inefficiently written code can impact an e-commerce site in many ways. For example, it could slow down site speed by loading page elements one after another instead of simultaneously and not prioritize the most important elements that need to be loaded quickly for a consumer to shop. Inefficient code might load the header of the page with a company logo, and then the footer of a page with the company’s address. Efficient code would load important items simultaneously and first, such as the search bar and add-to-cart button.
“If companies don’t analyze code execution in production, unexpectedly resource-intensive functions increase the latency and cost of web services every day, without anyone knowing or being able to do anything about it,” McLean writes.
That’s not to say Amazon Web Services is slowing down. Case in point: Amazon yesterday announced website domain company GoDaddy and the 75 million domains it manages would migrate the vast majority of its infrastructure to AWS.
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