eCommerceUX/UI Design

What is Tech Stack? Choosing the Right One for Your Business

What is tech stack?

Tech Stack is like a backpack filled with the right technologies to sift through before building a software (usually a mobile application or web). Each technology in that backpack plays a unique role in the application development process. It may involve UX/UI design technologies, programming languages, CI/CD, software and tools used by the development team. Tech Stack can also be understood as a solution to technology problems and is sometimes called Solution Stack.


Investing various elements of your tech stack is crucial to the success of any businesses, as they provides your team to develop and manage products that fulfill the needs of your customers.


The growth and development of new technologies that are introduced to the market every year increases rapidly in the 4.0 era. So in every period, there will be tech stacks that reign and occupy a large market share in the software development community.


There is, however, never the most superb or hegemonic tech stack. Each resonance from different technologies will bring a different result depending on the nature of the problem. Modern problems call for modern solutions.


The rising modern tech stack

Before Software as a Service (Saas) softwares and services took the tech market by storm, there weren’t a lot of software development tools available. Tech stacks were also relatively simple then: there were LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP), an older standard for building PHP-based web applications, and non-open source alternatives like WAMP (for those that preferred Windows to Linux).


In general, there are 3 main types of tech stack: a frontend stack, backend stack, or a full stack. Below are options you can consider for each type:


Frontend tech stack 

Modern web applications are based on coding languages such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, or frameworks based on JS, like React, Vue, and Express. Developers choose the programming languages and frameworks depending on the user experience they want to build, including the user interface and the functionality of the web pages or mobile application.


Backend tech stack

The backend or server-side tech stack consists of many components, like database, data structure, server, framework, and operating system. Lightweight technologies are ideal for basic purposes, whereas some are loaded with features that only a complex application might need. For example, some companies who utilize website development platforms like WordPress or Wix usually opt for built-in Google Analytics in order to generate and view data.


Full stack tech stack

This is the most common type of stack used in desktop web applications. It consists of both frontend and backend technologies–for example, angular for the UI, a framework like Django for the application logic, and a database like MongoDB for managing data.


A modern tech stack has many more components due to the increase in the number of devices from which users can access applications and the huge volumes of events and data processing. For that reason, it often contains advanced technologies like business intelligence, event processing, data lakes, analytics, and cloud services.


Businesses often select what goes into their tech stack based on the needs of their projects and other factors. An early stage company still finding traction might lean toward low-cost, flexible options they can switch out later, while another might choose technology that maximizes scalability, so they can meet the demands of enterprise customers.


The components of a modern tech stack

Tech Stack should be built from compatible technologies to achieve its ultimate goal–creating value for customer and businesses. Today, there is a pool of tools product teams and engineers can combine and use to develop and maintain products that serve their market segment. Below is an example of a general tech stack model for web development:

The components of a tech stack
The components of a tech stack


Here are some components in a tech stack along with some popular examples:

  • Programming languages:

    developers usually choose the languages they’re most comfortable working with as well as the type of application they want to build. A project may require several programming languages and operating systems.

Popular operating systems and languages:

Linux


iOS


Android


Swift


Java


Ruby


Python


Javascript

  • Servers:

    A web server takes in request (http) from the client (i.e. their browser), passes it on to the database for the requested information, and handles the response.

Popular services:


AWS


Google Cloud


Azure


Apache


Nginx


CloudFlare


Fastly

  • Databases:

    Data is an integral part of a tech stack. No matter how simple or complex your application, you need a place to store all your information. Some modern data platforms further enhance the functionality of databases by providing intelligent querying, aggregation, transformation features, and analytics tools in addition to data storage and retrieval.

Popular data infrastructure: 


MySQL


Azure SQL Synapse


MongoDB


Redshift


PostgresSQL


Snowflake


Splunk


Talend


Fivetran

  • Frameworks:

    a framework is a collection of languages, libraries, and utilities designed to help developers build applications. Frameworks provide the structure and basic functionality to build an application, including communicating with your database, handling requests from users, and automating some customer interaction functions. Frameworks can be backend or front end.

Popular backend frameworks:


Django


Laravel


Spring


.NET


Popular frontend frameworks:


AngularJS


React


Bootstrap


jQuery


Emberjs


Backbonejs

  • API Services:

    API (Application Programming Interface) services are interfaces that provide a program with a description of how to interact with a system in order to retrieve and/or change the data within it.

Popular API platforms: 


Segment


Google Apigee


Mulesoft


Tealium


Zapier

  • Monitoring and performance tools:

    these tools help you understand how each layer of your tech stack is performing. Monitoring and performance tools collect and analyze data about the technical performance of your software, and are designed to track the health of servers, databases, services, and other internal systems.

Popular options: 


New Relic


AppDynamics


Dynatrace


Datadog


How to choose the right tech stack for your business

Below are a list of factors to consider:


The speed and functionality of the application

What goes in your tech stack greatly depends on the business purpose you are trying to solve. A more advanced system and stack will be able to handle a large amount of data. In their start-up days, Twitter used to pick their tech stack based on Ruby on rails for rapid development. Then they switched to another stack using Java/Scala to increase the system’s load capacity.

Custom tech-stack


(Cre: mongodb.com) Custom tech-stack

Time to production

Picking an appropriate tech stack will help your team build a fully functional application in the least amount of time. If your developer team is used to PHP, a programming language, the LAMP stack is usually preferred over other stacks. Slack, a popular employee communication platform, is built with the LAMP stack. On the other hand, Microsoft’s stack is ideal for those who prefer Microsoft systems and frameworks.

LAMP stack vs WISA stack

LAMP stack vs WISA stack


The budget of your project

It is important to set a budget range for your project so you know how much you can allocate to your tech stack. It is critical to get stakeholders on board when it comes to investing in technology applications, particularly when there are now so many requests across all areas of the business. You will also want to consider future purchases you might need to make during the financial year and whether this cost will penalize something else you might need in the future.


Design and user experience

One of the most important questions to ask to build the right technology stack for your business is whether your tech stack caters to design requirements of the UX/UI team. A good user experience is the key to attracting more traffic. If your website is content-driven, choose a technology that supports server-side rendering. Choosing the right tools that will serve the purpose of your user interface will help you create a more seamless customer experience.

At a time where E-Commerce is growing 14.1% per year, you need modern and intuitive systems to effectively capture the market. Choosing the right tech stack can help you drive your products to success, making your product easier to build and ensuring it evolves alongside customer needs. Our team of full stack developers and UX/UI designers will work closely with you to deliver a digital solution for your business needs. Get in touch with us to see how we can build the right tech stack for you and put your idea to live.

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