What is tech stack?

Multinational corporations and small businesses alike invest heavily in their tech stacks and use innovative business tools to measure everything from product success to user analytics.

Investing in the right tech stack and the various elements that go with it is a core element that helps to determine the success of your business, especially software companies.

A tech stack consists of the technologies that work behind the scenes to store and manage data and is usually the most powerful tool that aids rapid development and enables product teams to access essential tools that build and maintain various products and services by meeting

The Different Types of Technology Stacks

Before the omnipresent rise of SaaS products and services, tech stacks were quite simple and generally included LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). They represented an older standard for building PHP-based web applications, and non-open source stand-ins like (WAMP).

In today’s digital market, there are a huge amount of online tools available that engineers and product teams can harmoniously utilize to build, develop and maintain the ideal operational model for their specific product and market segment or niche.

The specific needs and requirements of your technology stack depend on the nature of your business. For example, startups and small to medium-sized businesses might prefer to use low-cost, flexible tech stacks that they can easily upgrade at a later stage. Larger businesses might put an emphasis on scalability in order to meet the growing needs and demands of enterprise customers.

We have provided a list below of the basic categories of tech stacks to help you make the best choice:

Operating Systems & Programming Languages

When choosing a tech stack, the operating system, coding languages, and programming languages should be selected based on the environment that your business is most comfortable developing.

Depending on how you want to build your backend and your user experience, you’ll need to choose the right applications that you hope to optimize by taking into account the specific devices that you are building for on the server-side.

Servers & Load Balancing

This is an important part of your tech stack and includes everything from servers, content distribution networks, routing, and caching services that enable your applications to run effortlessly and scale as and when needed without breaking capacity.

Large tech companies such as Google and Amazon offer the very same components as small-scale companies but allow their users to access interactive user interfaces, and purchase each of their different services as a specific service line. This enables you to combine and complement different services based on the specific needs of your product while taking advantage of pricing structures.

Data Storage & Querying

This is another imperative layer of the tech stack that includes relational and non-relational databases, data-based warehouses, and data pipelines that facilitate the storage and querying of real-time and historical data.

These features are essential for proper data storage that relates to users, applications, and specific user data that enables you to learn, grow and improve future product offerings.

Backend Frameworks

A backend framework is a group of libraries, languages, designated utilities, and web development tools that are specifically designed to enable developers to effortlessly build applications from the ground up. Backend frameworks include most of the basic functionality developers need to build applications.

They provide structure for essential commodities like database organization and communication, dealing with user requests, and sending out and managing password reset or registration requests.

Some organizations choose to go it alone and build their frameworks and code from the ground up. But they often end up with a convoluted, time-consuming build that doesn’t make long-term financial sense.

Frontend Framework

Frontend tech refers to the front-end development of user interfaces and includes the user experience and client-side functionality of your product or service. Popular frameworks such as programming languages frameworks such as Java are the go-to choice when developing your front end.

API Services

API services are essential applications that enable businesses to connect and unite the essential tools that formulate an extended and extensive tech stack. API services can be clusters of hundreds of pre-built, specifically targeted APIs, while others are referred to as API gateways that enable traffic to be managed effectively. In order to minimize costs, businesses should evaluate any documentation and consider their strategic goals of implementation before making any commitments.

Monitoring & Performance Enhancing Tools

The most popular tech stacks have built-in machine learning capabilities and act as a secure analytics platform that helps you comprehend and understand how each specific layer of your tech stack is performing.

Monitoring and performance-enhancing tools enable businesses to effectively and effortlessly collect data and analysis about technical components such as software performance. Monitoring and performance tools also help businesses to track server health and monitor database organization.

Business Intelligence Solutions

Business intelligence solutions combine valuable data accumulated from differing parts of the company and market and help to monitor specific aspects of a company’s performance that relate to KPIs and metrics.

These tools help businesses make informed business decisions and ultimately guide better choices. One of the most integral components of business intelligence solutions is the ability to report and visualize data in new and innovative ways.

Behavioral & Product Analytics Solutions

This is probably the most recent addition that most companies will make to their tech stack, but is nonetheless important and crucial for overall success. Behavioral and product analytics solutions enable you to store, track and analyze customer behavior at each different stage of the user journey. These tools can be utilized in several different ways and offer innovative advantages for businesses that value new technologies and proactive insights.

The Most Critical Component Is Getting Your Technology Stack Right

Choosing a tech stack is a notoriously difficult decision if you don’t have the right research and information at hand. Platform-oriented technologies such as tech stacks need ongoing maintenance,

The perfect tech stack for the client-side or front-end of web apps should include hypertext markup language (HTML), CSS, and Javascript. This is the backbone of any good tech stack and enables web servers, background servers, and mobile apps to function correctly and is as important as choosing the right programming language.

Its widely known that different tech stacks have distinct use cases, benefits and drawbacks. Getting your tech stack right isn’t an easy feat, but when you do, you can expect the following benefits:

• More leads that provide a higher proportion of deals
• Increased productivity
• Faster problem solving
• Better forecasting and analytics capabilities
• Improved flexibility and agility

The Top 8 Tech Stack Models You Should Be Using Right Now

LAMP

LAMP is the foremost industry standard for tech stacks and delivers unparalleled flexibility, cost-efficiency, and performance when it comes to web development. LAMP, as you may have guessed, is an acronym that stands for:

• Linux – Operating System
• Apache – HTTP Server
• MySQL – Relational Database
• PHP – Programming Language

The important thing to note here is that all of the layers we’ve mentioned above are open source and free to use. LAMP tech stacks run universally on most operating systems and can easily be swapped out or modified with other components within the same tech stack.

ASP. NET

In recent years, Microsoft has developed its .NET Core, which has slowly gained traction and increased its market share. Microsoft’s innovative .NET applications are super lightweight, and can effectively run on either Windows or Linux.

Microsoft was quick to embrace burgeoning open source technologies, which have captured the interest of developers worldwide. The recent release of .Net 5 means that developers no longer need to worry about .NET Framework vs. NET Core.

The following applications can be effortlessly built using the .NET framework application tech stack:

• ASP.NET MVC – A standard model view controller framework
• IIS – Web server from Microsoft
• Angular frontend framework that utilizes TypeScript
• SQL Server – Enterprise Database from Microsoft
• Microsoft Azure – A vital tool for .NET developers

MEAN

MEAN is one of the most well-known and identifiable tech stacks and brings with it a whole host of benefits. One of the most unique benefits is the use of a single JavaScript language that’s free to use and open source. MEAN tech stacks usually consist of:

• MongoDB – A NoSQL database
• Express.js – A backend web framework tool
• Angular.js – A frontend web framework tool
• Node.js – Server-side JavaScript

The main reason why developers love MEAN tech stacks is that they provide an easy, efficient, and fast way to create apps. All of the different elements speak the same language (JSON JavaScript Object Notations) for seamless transmission of data and provide free access to the module library. The MEAN tech stack provides developers with the necessary tools to effortlessly build scalable software products and is a great choice for multiple different categories of websites and interactive applications.

MERN

MERN is somewhat similar to MEAN, with the main difference being the ability to change or modify Angular.js with React.

One of the reasons why developers choose to use MERN over MEAN is the intuitive React integration that allows different browser codes to be used on multiple servers at the same time.

React is also a great choice for web developers that require flexibility and enhanced performance when developing interactive user interfaces (UI).

MEVN

MEVN is yet another variation of the MEAN tech stack and uses Vue.js as the main frontend framework instead of Angular.js. Vue.js has become widely adopted in recent years and merges the best features of both Angular and React, respectively.

One of the main benefits of Vue.js is its ease of use, intuitive programming style and unbeatable performance for developing web applications.

Ruby On Rails

Ruby on Rails is a fairly new programming environment that uses a dynamic programming language called Ruby. The main benefit of Ruby on Rails is the ability to simplify and streamline the whole development process.

When server-side web apps are developed and written in the Ruby programming language, it requires less knowledge and supports the use of default database structures for easy management of webpages. Ruby on Rails is compatible with CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.

Python

Python is booming and is one of the fastest-growing languages in the world. It’s intuitive, easy to master, and is one of the main languages being taught to beginners and students as a development tool. It has a vast array of new and exciting features including data science and machine learning capabilities.

Python can also be used to develop seamless web applications with the help of integrated Django frameworks.

Java

The key thing to remember about Java is that it isn’t as dominant and widely used as it once was. It’s still popular nonetheless, but is mostly used to build enterprise applications and has far less justifiable use cases in recent years.

Modern organizations are moving away from Java and instead are using newer and lighter-weight application stacks such as Node.js and ASP.NET.