Apache Thrift

Since the beginning, Cal Henderson has been the CTO of Slack. Earlier this year, he commented on a Quora question summarizing their current stack.

Apps

• Web: a mix of JavaScript/ES6 and React.
• Desktop: And Electron to ship it as a desktop application.
• Android: a mix of Java and Kotlin.
• iOS: written in a mix of Objective C and Swift.

Backend

• The core application and the API written in PHP/Hack that runs on HHVM.
• The data is stored in MySQL using Vitess.
• Caching is done using Memcached and MCRouter.
• The search service takes help from SolrCloud, with various Java services.
• The messaging system uses WebSockets with many services in Java and Go.
• Load balancing is done using HAproxy with Consul for configuration.
• Most services talk to each other over gRPC,
• Some Thrift and JSON-over-HTTP
• Voice and video calling service was built in Elixir.

Data warehouse

• Built using open source tools including Presto, Spark, Airflow, Hadoop and Kafka.

Etc

• For server configuration and management we use Terraform, Chef and Kubernetes.
• We use Prometheus for time series metrics and ELK for logging.