Marcus KohlbergHow Bookshop.org reduced DevOps work by 95% using Encore Cloud
Bookshop unlocked product innovation by moving from Ruby on Rails to Go microservices with Encore
For over two years, Bookshop.org, a leading online marketplace for independent booksellers, has relied on Encore Cloud in production to power their development. In this case study, we hear from Mason Stewart, CTO at Bookshop.org, about Encore Cloud's impact to his team's DevOps workload and development productivity.
The Challenge
Before adopting Encore, the Bookshop.org team faced significant technical challenges as they scaled:
- Building and managing complex inventory systems
- Ensuring consistency in a growing codebase
- Reducing the operational burden of deployment.
Initially reliant on Ruby on Rails, the team encountered scalability constraints, and started migrating their systems to a microservices architecture using Go. This proved more difficult than expected, due to a lack of strong conventions in Go development, and extensive infrastructure overhead when deploying new services. As the migration progressed, these challenges became bottlenecks to innovation.
"We knew that we wanted to start moving some of our more complex systems over to Go, but coming from Rails, we found that we didn’t have the conventions we were used to, and that created inconsistency in our applications. Over time, we were frustrated with deployments. While Go produces a single binary, it was still a lot of Terraform and bespoke deployment work. Secrets, environment variables—everything was all over the place."
Encore Solution: Clear Conventions and Rapid Deployments
Encore immediately provided a structured framework for Bookshop.org’s Go-based services, solving major pain points around infrastructure, consistency, and developer productivity. By simplifying deployments, automating environment management, and enforcing best practices, Encore Cloud allowed the team to focus on building products rather than wrestling with infrastructure.
"Someone suggested Encore, and even though it was a big shift for us, immediately we could see that it was making life better. The difference between our hand-rolled Go application and our Encore application was night and day."
Quantifiable Outcomes
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95% reduction in DevOps workload
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Zero ramp-up time for new service or application deployments
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Internal stakeholders responding positively to improved delivery speed
Accelerating Time-to-Market: Audiobooks Delivered at Unprecedented Speed
Encore enabled Bookshop.org to launch new products much faster, exemplified by their audiobook initiative:
"We would never have been able to build our ebooks product in the time we did without Encore. It provided exactly the clarity, tooling, and stability we needed."
Solving Complex Technical Problems
Encore empowered Bookshop.org's engineering team to overcome some of their most challenging technical hurdles, including:
Observability and built-in tracing
Having access to Encore's built-in tracing capabilities improved the baseline practices for Bookshop.org:
"Encore traces are really clear, and have created a culture of tracing and observability that we didn’t have previously. There’s no longer any excuse to have an unobserved service."
Complex large-file streaming
Bookshop.org needed to solve for handling massive ebook files, processing files without exhausting memory resources. Encore Cloud made this complex work simple:
"We're streaming very large ePub files directly from cloud storage and manipulating the contents without ever having to load the entire file into disk or RAM. Combining Encore, Go, and Google Cloud Run helped us accomplish this in a short amount of time, and the result is surprisingly cost effective. This would have been much more difficult in our legacy applications."
Efficient cross-service integration testing
Through Encore's intuitive testing and mocking capabilities, Bookshop's testing reliability and developer confidence was significantly improved:
"Go testing can be clunky, but once Encore introduced first-class mocking, we could easily write integration tests that span multiple services with predictable behavior."
Enhanced Stability and Control
Initially concerned about vendor lock-in and platform risk, Bookshop.org quickly found that Encore provided both flexibility and stability:
"Encore completely removes lock-in concerns because the path to self-hosting is crystal clear, especially since Encore Cloud is cleanly separated from [the open-source frameworks] Encore.go and Encore.ts. Even if Encore Cloud disappeared, we could still run our applications seamlessly anywhere. That gave us tremendous peace of mind."
Empowering Team Productivity
Encore’s streamlined workflows and operational simplicity allowed the Bookshop.org engineering team to focus purely on high-value feature development:
"Encore reduced our time to launch new features and improved our overall stability and velocity. Even non-technical stakeholders are noticing and saying: Hey, seems like it was a great decision to move to Encore."
Scaling with Confidence
Encore has provided a clear path for future growth and continued innovation, even as the Bookshop.org product and team scales:
"Encore has changed the way I think about hiring and DevOps roles. Because engineers can stand up and deploy new services completely on their own with no special infrastructure work, it allows us to dedicate more resources to feature development. This also lets us focus DevOps talent on complex problems outside of Encore. It allows us to forget about boilerplate work to launch new services and turn our attention to the truly unique and interesting challenges of building a best-in-class global platform."
Key Takeaways
- Encore Cloud has reduced Bookshop.org DevOps workload by 95%
- Encore's structured framework has improved developer productivity and stakeholders are noticing
- Encore's observability and testing tools have established a new baseline for development practices
"Encore transformed how we build products. If your goal is to reduce complexity, increase deployment velocity, and empower your team to focus on innovation, Encore is absolutely the right choice. We’d never go back."
Conclusion
By using Encore Cloud, Bookshop.org has reduced DevOps workload by 95% and achieved a significantly improved delivery speed for new products. This has allowed them to confidently and quickly iterate and develop their microservices architecture.
Book a 1:1 intro to find out how Encore Cloud can reduce your DevOps workload and support your product innovation goals.
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