Case Study: Slack achieves rapid scalability and enterprise-grade reliability with Amazon Web Services

Slack - Customer Case Study

Slack is a messaging platform that unifies tools like Google Docs, Jira, and GitHub, and grew rapidly after its 2014 launch—reaching over 1.1 million daily users, 300,000 paid seats, and 30 million weekly messages within 18 months. Faced with explosive growth and the need for a lean, low-cost IT model that supported speed, agility, and enterprise-grade security, Slack ruled out traditional datacenter hardware that would slow capacity expansion and increase operational complexity.

Slack built its infrastructure on Amazon Web Services, using EC2, S3, EBS, VPC, Route 53, and other services alongside Redis, MySQL, and Solr to enable fast scaling, disaster recovery, and strong security controls. The AWS-based architecture let Slack provision new capacity in seconds, practice rapid recovery, cut storage costs by switching to lower-cost EBS volumes, and deliver the reliability and compliance assurances required by large enterprise customers—supporting its continued growth and valuation.

Slack

Richard Crowley

Slack