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How Slack Supports Billions of Daily Messages
- Slack, originally developed from an internal communication tool for a video game company, evolved into a real-time collaboration platform handling millions of concurrent users and messages.
- Slack's architecture emphasizes separation of concerns and a push-first mentality for real-time updates, distinguishing it from traditional request-response applications.
- The core abstraction of persistent messaging ensures messages are not just displayed in real-time but also stored, indexed, and replayed when needed.
- The implementation of atomic broadcast in Slack guarantees validity, integrity, and total order in message delivery across the platform.
- Slack's evolution in message send flows shifted from prioritizing responsiveness to ensuring message persistence upfront, leading to a more reliable system.
- The introduction of Flannel, a geo-distributed cache for session bootstrapping, improved scalability by reducing the workload on the backend, especially for large organizations.
- Slack's architecture utilizes Kafka for durable message queuing and Redis for in-flight job data, ensuring reliability and efficient processing of messages.
- Overall, Slack's complex architecture prioritizes user trust, real-time messaging, and session consistency, adapting to challenges through distributed microservices and specialized components.
- Lessons from Slack's architecture include optimizing for latency, building resilience to failure, embracing complexity where necessary, and simplifying where possible.
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