What Is a Tech Stack?

When building a skyscraper, you don’t start with the marble facade or the fountain in the lobby. You start with a deep foundation and girders to hang everything else on. Your tech stack is like this skeleton and you should consider hiring a cloud architect to help ensure your stack does not fall apart.

A tech stack is the underlying elements of a web or mobile application. These are the frameworks, languages, and software products that everything else is built on. For example, you might have created your web application with Ruby on Rails—that’s the language and framework. That might access a database created with PostgreSQL. You’ll need to host that on a server, say, an Apache server. You’ll need Phusion Passenger to make that happen. Those are all elements of the server-side stack.

The client-side tech stack includes HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. That’s what translates your application to a readable format for the user’s browser. If you’ve created a mobile application, the stack is very small: it’s usually only a native application, created with something like Xcode or Android Studio.