Tech Stacks From Top Tech Companies

Tech stack, or technology stack, is a term used to describe the tools, services, software, hardware, coding languages, operating systems and programs used by a company to build an application. Today, tech stack can also refer to the technologies used by marketing and sales teams to monitor how users interact with an application. Data ecosystem and solutions stack are two other terms that are synonymous with tech stack.

It’s known as a stack because each component builds on top of one another, thus stacking up. The technologies at the bottom serve as the foundation, so developers have to pay attention to the order in which they stack tech.

Why Tech Stacks Matter

Tech stacks will have a huge bearing on how an application operates. The coding and programs that the developers choose can either lead to limitations or enhance scalability. They can affect how users are able to interact with an application and how many people can access an application at the same time. Tech stacks give developers the ability to customize an application beyond what is possible with a single tool. 

In short, a tech stack defines what an application is and what it can be. 

As you’ll see in the examples below, specific tech stacks are utilized for the backend, front-end, mobile devices, marketing, sales, HR, productivity and analytics. Tech stacks are unique for every company, but many developers consider what’s needed on the front-end (client-side) before deciding on the best tech stack for the backend (server-side). Then subsequent tech stacks are created to meet the demands of the departments that will use them. 

Amazon Tech Stack

Applications and Data
Java
MySQL
AngularJS
Amazon EC2
Amazon S3
Amazon RDS
Amazon EC2 Container Service
Amazon DynamoDB
Perl
Amazon SQS
Amazon VPC
Amazon ElastiCache
Amazon Redshift
Amazon EBS
Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL
Amazon EMR
Amazon SimpleDB

Utilities
Amazon CloudFront
Amazon Route 53
Amazon SES
Amazon SNS
Amazon API Gateway
Amazon Kinesis
Amazon Glacier
Amazon Elastic Transcoder
Amazon CloudSearch
Amazon SWF
Amazon Mobile Analytics
Amazon A/B Testing
Amazon Mechanical Turk 
Amazon FPS

DevOps
Amazon CloudWatch

Business Tools
Amazon WorkSpaces

Facebook Tech Stack

Applications and Data

PHP
React
GraphQL
Memcached
Cassandra
Flux
Tornado
HHVM
Relay
Presto
Hack
RocksDB
Prophet
Prepack
Buck
McRouter
Beringei
Yoga
C++
Haskell
Erlang
HBase
MariaDB
Hadoop
MySQL
Swift

Languages and Coding
Linux 
Apache HTTP 
MySQL 
PHP
JavaScript
HTML
CSS
PHP
ReactJS
JSON
AJAX

Utilities
Framer
BitBar
Docusaurus 
Origami
Stetho
Pop
ENorm

DevOps
Jenkins
Datadog
Jest
Chef
Phabricator
Nuclide
Infer
LogDevice

Business Tools
Confluence
Campaign Monitor

Uber Tech Stack (as of Spring 2016)

Infrastructure and Storage
Terraform
Schemaless
MySQL
Riak
Cassandra
Postgres
Hadoop
Redis
Twemproxy

Data Logging
Kafka
Hadoop
Elasticsearch
Logstash
Kibana

App Provisions
Docker
Mesos
Aurora

Service Discovery and Routing
HAProxy
Hyperbahn
Ringpop
TChannel
JSON
HTTP
HTTP/2
SPDY
NGINX
Thrift
Protobuf
Mesos

Development and Deployment
Phabricator
OpenGrok
GitHub
Jenkins
Packer
Vagrant
Boto
Unison
Clusto
Puppet
uBlame
Whober
Sphinx
OSX
Linux
Debian Jesse

Coding Languages
Python
Node.js
Go
Java
Tornado
C
C++
HAProxy

Testing and Monitoring
Hailstorm
uDestroy
Phabricator
Nagios

Engineering Metrics and Analysis
Go
M3
Grafana
Argos
μMonitor
Common Action Gateway
Storm
Spark
JavaScript
React
SVG
Canvas 2D
WebGL

Mapping
Java
Gurafu
µETA
DropWizard

Slack Tech Stack

Web Client
JavaScript 
ES6
Electron

Mobile Devices
Java
Kotlin
Objective C 
Swift

Backend/API
PHP
Hacklang
HHVM
HAProxy
Consul

Data Storage
MySQL
Vitess
Memcached 
MCRouter
Presto
Spark
Airflow
Hadoop 
Kafka

Search Service
Java
SolrCloud

Real-Time Messaging/Communication
WebSockets
Java 
Go

Services
gRPC
Thrift 
JSON-over-HTTP
Elixir
Node
Kafka 
Redis

Server
Terraform
Chef 
Kubernetes
Prometheus
ELK

Hosting
AWS

Airbnb Tech Stack

Applications and Data
Nginx
JavaScript
Java
React
MySQL
Amazon EC2
Amazon S3
Redis
Ruby
Sass
Rails
Amazon RDS
Hadoop
Amazon Elasticache
Amazon EBS
Airflow
Presto
Druid
Native Navigation
Airpal

Utilities
Amazon CloudFront
Twilio SendGrid
Amazon Route 53
Twilio
Visual Website Optimizer
Braintree
Lottie
Nexmo
Urban Airship
Aerosolve
DeepLinkDispatch

DevOps
GitHub
New Relic
Webpack
Sentry
Vagrant
Kibana
Amazon CloudWatch
Logstash
Datadog
Jest
Chef
Enzyme
Apache Mesos
SmartStack

Business Tools
Slack
G Suite
InVision
Asana
Superset
React Sketch.app
Assemblage

Analytics
Mixpanel
Google Analytics
Campaign Monitor

You probably noticed all of these companies have analytics tools in their tech stack, and these solutions can be used for more than just gathering user-based data. Without an analytics platform like Mixpanel, it’s virtually impossible for developers to gather information across their data ecosystem to fix problems and make adjustments where needed in the tech stack.