A deep dive into the technology behind building Slack. Written by engineers, for engineers passionate about solving complex technical problems.
Visit slack.engineering → RSS feedOn Hacker News Oct 2016 – Jan 2025
Software Engineering 19Systems & Performance 7Web & Frontend 4Infrastructure & DevOps 4Security & Privacy 3Networking & Internet 3
“What is the easiest way to securely connect tens of thousands of computers, hosted at multiple cloud service providers in dozens of locations around the globe?” If you want our answer, it’s Nebula, but I recommend that you read the rest of this short post before clicking that shiny link. At Slack, we asked ourselves…
Slack has a global customer base, with millions of simultaneously connected users at peak times. Most of the communication between users involves sending lots of tiny messages to each other. For much of Slack’s history, we’ve used HAProxy as a load balancer for all incoming traffic. Today, we’ll talk about problems we…
On September 30th 2021, Slack had an outage that impacted less than 1% of our online user base, and lasted for 24 hours. This outage was the result of our attempt to enable DNSSEC — an extension intended to secure the DNS protocol, required for FedRAMP Moderate — but which ultimately led to a series of…