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Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

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Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#41

Post by namelosw »

It's interesting to compare Slack's tech stack vs Discord. The tech stack of slack is pretty common, while the tech stack of Discord is very geeky: Elixir/Rust + Cassandra for crazy high concurrency, and React/React Native for fast developing and consistent experience.

Like LAMP for Slack, Discord also used MongoDB prototyping in the first few years, but while they prototyping they prototype in a manner they can easily migrate to Cassandra later. Then they successfully migrated to Cassandra. This is brilliant.

I remember the React community migrated from Slack to Discord[0], I guess one of the reason could be the performance. According to the blog, at that time the team only have "14 people full time", which means they've got a very high velocity, amazing.

I didn't find any summary of their whole tech stack but there are several insightful articles from their blog like[1].

[0] https://reactjs.org/blog/2015/10/19/reactiflux-is-moving-to-...

[1] https://blog.discordapp.com/how-discord-stores-billions-of-m...

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#42

Post by lubujackson »

sonnyblarney wrote: post #21

Something that differentiates Slack from other apps, is that there should never be any need to manage data across corporate clusters. Instead of a massive, complicated back-end, imagine if each Slack 'installation' (i.e. customer) had their own set of services, distinct from one another. Even with 10K users each for the larger customer accounts, I'd imagine that 'customer backend' might not have be super complicated.…

I remember reading Evernote had a simple MySQL DB for every account, kind of a similar approach.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#43

Post by MuffinFlavored »

namelosw wrote: post #41

It's interesting to compare Slack's tech stack vs Discord. The tech stack of slack is pretty common, while the tech stack of Discord is very geeky: Elixir/Rust + Cassandra for crazy high concurrency, and React/React Native for fast developing and consistent experience. Like LAMP for Slack, Discord also used MongoDB prototyping in the first few years, but while they prototyping they prototype in a manner they can easi…

How many more users/how much more traffic does Slack have than Discord...?

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#44

Post by namelosw »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #43
namelosw wrote: post #41

It's interesting to compare Slack's tech stack vs Discord. The tech stack of slack is pretty common, while the tech stack of Discord is very geeky: Elixir/Rust + Cassandra for crazy high concurrency, and React/React Native for fast developing and consistent experience. Like LAMP for Slack, Discord also used MongoDB prototyping in the first few years, but while they prototyping they prototype in a manner they can easi…

How many more users/how much more traffic does Slack have than Discord...?

Probably the hard part is not about overall traffic. If Slack have a billion channels, while every channel only has 10 to 1k users, it's much easier than say, if Discord having a million channels while some channel having 100k users. If you thinking in algorithmic complexity.

I'm pretty sure the Reactiflux channel exceeded 50k long time ago.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#46

Post by ec109685 »

namelosw wrote: post #41

It's interesting to compare Slack's tech stack vs Discord. The tech stack of slack is pretty common, while the tech stack of Discord is very geeky: Elixir/Rust + Cassandra for crazy high concurrency, and React/React Native for fast developing and consistent experience. Like LAMP for Slack, Discord also used MongoDB prototyping in the first few years, but while they prototyping they prototype in a manner they can easi…

Slack uses Elixir for their auto and video conferencing as well.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#47

Post by skinnymuch »

el_benhameen wrote: post #26
atombender wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Slack started out as an internal chat tool by Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield's Tiny Speck, which was trying to launch the game Glitch. When Glitch failed, they spun out Slack as a new company (or they renamed the company, not sure). This is almost the exact thing that happened with Butterfield's first venture, Flickr, which was built on a web platform they wrote for a multiplayer online game called Game Nevere…

Poor fellow. Maybe third time's the charm and he'll finally see some success.

Poor fellow indeed.

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#48

Post by skinnymuch »

slezakattack wrote: post #9

I'm curious if Slack ever considered using XMPP in their stack for core chat? As an outsider, it seems XMPP would fit like a glove (even signing in to a work "domain" screams XMPP).

What would be the advantages now that they already have the product built?

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#49

Post by acemarke »

namelosw wrote: post #41

It's interesting to compare Slack's tech stack vs Discord. The tech stack of slack is pretty common, while the tech stack of Discord is very geeky: Elixir/Rust + Cassandra for crazy high concurrency, and React/React Native for fast developing and consistent experience. Like LAMP for Slack, Discord also used MongoDB prototyping in the first few years, but while they prototyping they prototype in a manner they can easi…

I'm an admin on Reactiflux (although at the time of the switch from Slack to Discord, I had just joined as a newbie).

We got kicked off Slack because we got up towards 10K users signed up, and Slack locked us from having any more people join. Clearly, we weren't a good fit for their business model. Worked out well for us - we've loved Discord ever since we switched over!

Re: Timeline of Slack’s Tech Stack Evolution

#50

Post by acemarke »

namelosw wrote: post #44
MuffinFlavored wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many more users/how much more traffic does Slack have than Discord...?

Probably the hard part is not about overall traffic. If Slack have a billion channels, while every channel only has 10 to 1k users, it's much easier than say, if Discord having a million channels while some channel having 100k users. If you thinking in algorithmic complexity. I'm pretty sure the Reactiflux channel exceeded 50k long time ago.

We've done a few purges of inactive users over time, so the number of "total members" has done the usual garbage-collection sawtooth graph shape.

Looking at the server right this second, I see 2800 online, and 72.5K total members.

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