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blog|Culture<br>Quick: An internal hosting platform for the AI era<br>Quick lets anyone at Shopify ship a site in seconds. It has changed the culture of how we build and share.<br>/ Alex Pilon

Published on Jun 10, 2026

img]:mt-3 [&_a>img]:mb-8 [&_a>img]:h-[revert-layer] [&_img]:my-12 [&_a>img]:inline-block [&_figure>img]:mb-0 [&_figure]:mb-12 [&_img]:inline-block [&_ul]:list-disc [&_ul]:space-y-3 [&_ul]:pl-6 [&_ul]:mb-6 [&_ul_li]:pl-4 [&_ol]:list-decimal [&_ol]:space-y-3 [&_ol]:pl-6 [&_ol]:mb-6 [&_ol_li]:pl-4 [&_ol_li::marker]:font-bold [&_iframe]:max-w-full [&_figcaption]:mb-12 [&_figcaption]:text-center [&_figcaption]:text-xs [&_figcaption]:sm:text-sm [&_figcaption]:mt-1 [&_strong]:font-medium [&_.heading--4]:font-aktivgroteskextended [&_.heading--4]:text-2xl [&_.heading--4]:font-medium [&_.heading--4]:tracking-[-.02em] [&_iframe]:mt-3 [&_iframe]:mb-9 [&_.container]:m-0 [&_.container]:flex [&_.container]:gap-5 [&_.container]:flex-wrap [&_.green]:text-[green] [&_.red]:text-[red] [&_.pros]:bg-[#eafaea] [&_.pros]:rounded-[10px] [&_.pros]:p-5 [&_.pros_h3]:mt-2 [&_.cons]:bg-[#ffebe6] [&_.cons]:rounded-[10px] [&_.cons]:p-5 [&_.cons_h3]:mt-2 [&_.pros]:tablet:flex-[1_0_calc(50%-10px)] [&_.pros]:flex-[1_0_100%] [&_.cons]:tablet:flex-[1_0_calc(50%-10px)] [&_.cons]:flex-[1_0_100%] [&_.pros_.grid-container]:grid [&_.cons_.grid-container]:grid [&_.grid-container]:gap-[5px] [&_.grid-container]:grid-cols-[15px_auto] [&_.pros_.grid-container]:p-[5px] [&_.cons_.grid-container]:p-[5px] [&_.aspect-video_iframe]:mt-0 article-content [&_.truncated-text]:relative [&_.truncated-text]:max-h-[300px] [&_.truncated-text]:overflow-hidden [&_.truncated-text]:mb-6 [&_.truncated-text::before]:absolute [&_.truncated-text::before]:content-[""] [&_.truncated-text::before]:bottom-0 [&_.truncated-text::before]:w-full [&_.truncated-text::before]:h-[150px] [&_.truncated-text::before]:bg-gradient-to-t [&_.truncated-text::before]:from-white [&_.truncated-text::before]:from-50% [&_.truncated-text::before]:to-transparent [&_.truncated-text\_\_toggle]:absolute [&_.truncated-text\_\_toggle]:bottom-0 [&_.truncated-text\_\_toggle]:w-full [&_.truncated-text\_\_toggle]:text-center [&_.marketing-code]:bg-[#f0f1f2] [&_.marketing-code]:font-bold [&_.marketing-code]:p-1 [&_.marketing-code.marketing-code--block]:p-4 [&_.marketing-code--block]:block [&_.marketing-code--block]:max-w-full [&_.marketing-code--block]:overflow-x-scroll [&_.marketing-code--block]:mb-5 [&_.partners-signup]:mt-6 [&_.partners-signup]:mb-12 [&_.partners-signup]:bg-gray-200 [&_.partners-signup]:p-3 [&_.partners-signup]:md:p-6 [&_.table]:block [&_.table]:overflow-x-scroll [&_.table]:max-w-full text-engineering-dark-text [&_h2]:text-inherit [&_h3]:text-inherit [&_h4]:text-inherit [&_.heading--4]:text-inherit [&_a]:text-[#E7ECFB] [&_strong]:text-engineering-dark-text" itemProp="articleBody"><br>Shopify attracts people who love to tinker. Building has never been the bottleneck here. People are always making things: prototypes, dashboards, little tools for their teams. The hard part was getting those things in front of anyone else.

Our solution to this was Quick: an internal platform where you drop in a folder of HTML and assets and get back a secure URL that only Shopify employees can see. No frameworks, deploy pipelines, or config files. You just upload a folder and your site is live. If you need a database, AI, file storage, or websockets, those are just an API call away.

We launched Quick in July 2025, and the timing turned out to be perfect. AI had just gotten good enough that people across every discipline, not just us engineers, could generate a working website from a prompt. Quick gave them somewhere to put it. AI wasn't why we built it, but it's a big part of why it took off.

Today, Quick hosts more than 50,000 sites across Shopify. Over half the company has created at least one. Everything from dashboards that teams rely on daily to a multiplayer mountain-climbing game that nobody asked for but everybody plays.

This is how we got here.

Architecture

Quick started with the idea of finding the simplest way to put HTML files somewhere and serve them. And what's simpler than every "site" being just a folder of assets in a Google Cloud Storage bucket?

To serve them, we put a lightweight NGINX server in front, with a wildcard config so that mysite.quick.shopify.io maps straight to the mysite folder. But we didn't want NGINX to know anything about querying buckets. This is where gcsfuse came in: it mounts the bucket as if it were part of the local filesystem, so NGINX thinks it's just serving local files.

Authentication is just as simple. The whole server sits behind Identity-Aware Proxy (IAP), so every request is already a verified Shopify employee before it ever reaches a site.

The `quick deploy` command is nothing more than a small wrapper...