Chilli

We use nginx because it is a great frontal Web server by itself, but also because we rely on the Nchan module for server push.

We use AWS mostly because Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL is a very good and cheap solution to get a managed PostgreSQL.

We also use Amazon EC2 for the servers, with the Arch Linux images from Uplink Labs. We chose Arch Linux because of its up-to-date packages, especially for Python. We use Pacman to package and deploy our services.

We use TypeScript because it is the native language of Angular applications, but also because types helps prevent errors at compile time.

Unlike our frontend, we chose Flask, a microframework, for our backend. We use it with Python 3 and Gunicorn.

One of the reasons was that I have significant experience with this framework. However, it also was a rather straightforward choice given that our backend almost only serves REST APIs, and that most of the work is talking to the database with SQLAlchemy .

We could have gone with something like Hug but it is kind of early. We might revisit that decision for new services later on.