Slack's Real-Time Messaging Infrastructure
How Slack delivers messages in real-time to millions of users. Shows WebSocket Gateway for persistent connections, Channel Service for message routing, MySQL with Vitess sharding for message storage, Flannel for client-side caching, Kafka for event streaming, and Elasticsearch for search.
general · architecture diagram.
How Slack delivers messages in real-time to millions of users. Shows WebSocket Gateway for persistent connections, Channel Service for message routing, MySQL with Vitess sharding for message storage, Flannel for client-side caching, Kafka for event streaming, and Elasticsearch for search.
Created by
February 9, 2026
Updated
April 1, 2026 at 3:34 AM
Type
architecture
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