The Operator Stack

The tools running the companies we cover.

A living map of the infrastructure, models, data, apps, and governance layers that principled builders actually ship with — curated by The Lantern Daily.

A systems architect studying infrastructure topology

Layers mapped

Infra to governance

20+

Tools profiled

Updated monthly

18,472+

Operators reading

And growing

The compute, deploy, and edge layer that everything else runs on.

Deploy

Vercel

Frontend cloud & edge runtime

Compute

Modal

Serverless GPU compute

Edge

Cloudflare

Edge network & workers

Database

Neon

Serverless Postgres

Foundation and open models powering generation and reasoning.

Routing

AI Gateway

Unified model routing

Open

Llama

Open-weight foundation models

Frontier

Claude

Reasoning & long context

Open

Mistral

Efficient open models

Pipelines, vectors, and warehouses that feed the agents.

Cache

Upstash

Serverless Redis & vector

Analytics

DuckDB

In-process analytics

Backend

Supabase

Postgres + auth + storage

ETL

dbt

Transformation layer

The product surfaces operators actually ship to customers.

Framework

Next.js

Full-stack React framework

Linear

Issue & roadmap tracking

Resend

Transactional email

Payments

Stripe

Payments & billing

Controls, audit trails, and compliance for principled scale.

Observability

Sentry

Error & performance monitoring

Compliance

Vanta

Continuous compliance