The tech stack at ExpressVPNWhat our tech stack looks like

The second world, infrastructure, is also quite large and complex. We have thousands of physical servers for our VPN, spread all over the world. We also run a lot of our backend services on the public cloud providers, mostly Amazon Web Services (AWS). For the cloud infrastructure, we leverage a lot of different AWS services, as well as standardized pieces like Kubernetes and Istio. We have several teams dedicated to continually improving our infrastructure, and providing the best tooling for our teams.

The fourth world, the cloud backend, is more diverse than you might expect.

These are the services that manage our user accounts, make payments, and do all the other things that keep the system going. We’ve been in business since 2009, so there’s a mixture of different technologies based on when certain pieces were first built. The oldest parts are Ruby, but there are some Lua and Go in newer components.

There's a brand new experimental service built completely in Rust, and we’re also considering using Rust to replace some of our old C++ code. We’re also starting to migrate our oldest Ruby components to Go. It’s a continuous effort trying to keep this stack refreshed and current.

The sixth and final world is our data platform. This is a very new piece, currently leveraging a healthy amount of Python and Amazon Redshift. We have an extremely strict privacy policy, so a key challenge for our data team is figuring out how we can get the information to improve our service without compromising the privacy or security of our customers in any way.

We’re actively planning the future of our data platform, and we expect to add a lot of new technologies and components over the course of 2024. Right now, there’s an amazing opportunity for new data engineers to help shape the future of our data technologies.