Best examples of Rust in production: which companies and projects?

The best examples of Rust in production are the ones where it solves a real engineering problem at scale: reducing tail latency, eliminating memory-safety bugs, lowering infrastructure costs, or building security-critical software without sacrificing native-code performance.

My top picks are Cloudflare, AWS, Discord, and Figma for company case studies, and Pingora, Firecracker, Tokio, ripgrep, and the Linux kernel's Rust support for studying the code and architecture.

One important distinction: a company using Rust successfully doesn't mean its entire product is written in Rust. Some of the strongest examples are targeted rewrites of performance-critical components within larger systems. Laying the foundation for Rust's futureSustainability with RustHow Mozilla’s Rust dramatically improved our server-side performance

1. Best companies using Rust in production

1. Cloudflare

Best infrastructure case study

What it does: Uses Rust in core networking and edge infrastructure.

Study: Pingora, Cloudflare's Rust framework for building high-performance HTTP proxies and network services.

Why it's exemplary: Cloudflare developed Pingora to replace parts of its NGINX-based proxy infrastructure. It's an excellent case study in using Rust for high-throughput networking, custom protocol logic, and safer systems programming. Cloudflare open-sourced Pingora in 2024. Rust At Scale 2026: After Pingora, Discord, and Microsoft, What Rust Adoption Actually Looks LikeGitHub - ImplFerris/rust-in-production: Rust In Production

2. Amazon Web Services

Best systems programming example

What it does: Builds virtualization, cloud infrastructure, and security-sensitive components in Rust.

Study: Firecracker and Bottlerocket.

Why it's exemplary: Firecracker is a lightweight virtual machine monitor used to support serverless and container workloads. Bottlerocket is a Linux-based operating system designed for running containers. Both demonstrate Rust's suitability for low-level software where resource efficiency and isolation matter. Sustainability with Rust

3. Discord

Best performance migration story

What it does: Uses Rust for latency-sensitive backend services.

Study: Why Discord is switching from Go to Rust.

Why it's exemplary: Discord's Read States service encountered garbage-collection-related latency spikes in Go. Its Rust rewrite removed those GC pauses and dramatically reduced memory usage in the reported deployment. This is a particularly useful case study for understanding when a rewrite is worth its cost. Sustainability with RustGitHub - ImplFerris/rust-in-production: Rust In Production

4. Figma

What it does: Uses Rust for performance-critical parts of its collaborative editing backend.

Study: Rust in production at Figma.

Why it's exemplary: Figma reported an order-of-magnitude improvement in server-side multiplayer editing performance. Equally valuable, its engineers explained why they chose to rewrite only the performance-sensitive part rather than the entire server. It's a good example of pragmatic language selection, not just a success story. How Mozilla’s Rust dramatically improved our server-side performance

5. 1Password

What it does: Uses Rust in security-sensitive shared software for its password manager.

Study: 1Password engineering and Rust.

Why it's exemplary: Password management needs careful handling of sensitive data, predictable resource usage, and consistent behavior across platforms. Rust is a compelling fit for a shared core used by multiple applications. This is a strong example of security-oriented application engineering, rather than just raw throughput.

6. Google

What it does: Uses Rust in Android and other systems software.

Study: Android's official Rust documentation.

Why it's exemplary: Google has used Rust to develop native components with fewer memory-safety risks than traditional C and C++ implementations. Android is particularly relevant if you're interested in operating systems, embedded development, and gradually modernizing a large existing codebase.

Other notable adopters include Microsoft, Meta, Dropbox, Mozilla, and Brave. For a broader directory with links to public engineering write-ups, see Rust in Production. GitHub - ImplFerris/rust-in-production: Rust In ProductionGitHub - omarabid/rust-companies: A list of companies using Rust in production.

2. Best open-source Rust projects to study

These are the projects I'd examine if I wanted to understand how experienced Rust developers build real software, not just complete tutorials.

1. Pingora

Networking · Distributed infrastructure

GitHub repository

Why study it: Production-oriented proxy architecture, asynchronous I/O, connection management, HTTP handling, and graceful error handling. Start here to understand how Rust powers internet-scale infrastructure.

2. Firecracker

Virtualization · Security · Systems

GitHub repository

Why study it: A real virtual machine monitor built in Rust. It's a great reference for low-level resource management, system interfaces, isolation boundaries, and security-conscious design.

3. Tokio

Async runtime · Concurrency

GitHub repository

Why study it: Tokio is foundational infrastructure for much of the Rust networking ecosystem. Its runtime, task scheduling, synchronization primitives, and I/O abstractions demonstrate how to build reusable concurrency infrastructure.

4. ripgrep

CLI tools · Algorithms · Performance

GitHub repository

Why study it: A superb example of practical, maintainable Rust. It combines efficient searching, parallel directory traversal, careful use of libraries, and a polished command-line interface. It's also much easier to explore than a hypervisor or runtime.

5. Linux kernel Rust support

Operating systems · Drivers · FFI

Rust-for-Linux project

Why study it: Rust support in Linux illustrates the challenges of introducing a new language into a mature C codebase. Look at foreign-function interfaces, kernel abstractions, safety invariants, and the limits of what Rust can guarantee when interacting with unsafe code.

6. Zed

Desktop applications · UI · Collaboration

GitHub repository

Why study it: A substantial Rust application rather than a small systems utility. It's useful for exploring application architecture, rendering, responsiveness, asynchronous tasks, and collaborative features.

7. Meilisearch

Backend services · Search · Data processing

GitHub repository

Why study it: A complete search product with indexing, query processing, persistence, APIs, and operational concerns. It's a good reference for building an end-to-end backend service in Rust.

8. Servo

Browser engines · Parallelism · Rendering

GitHub repository

Why study it: Servo explores how Rust's ownership and concurrency models can support a complex browser engine. It's a valuable example of ambitious systems architecture, although the project is still working toward broader production readiness. About - Servo aims to empower developers with a lightweight, high-performance alternative for embedding web technologies in applications.

3. Which projects are best for each skill?

If you want to learn…	Start with	Then explore
Idiomatic, maintainable Rust	ripgrep	Meilisearch
Async Rust and networking	Tokio	Pingora
Systems programming and isolation	Firecracker	Linux kernel Rust
Large application architecture	Zed	Servo
Real-world performance optimization	Discord's case study	Pingora
Memory safety in critical systems	Linux kernel Rust	Firecracker
Commercial product engineering	Figma's case study	1Password

4. What makes these examples particularly valuable?

The strongest production examples tend to demonstrate at least one of four things:

• Performance without a garbage collector: Rust gives developers control over allocations and memory layout, which can help reduce latency variability and resource usage.
• Memory safety: Its ownership model and type system eliminate many common classes of memory errors in safe Rust code. Unsafe blocks and foreign-function interfaces still require careful auditing.
• Concurrency: Ownership and type checking can prevent many data races, while libraries such as Tokio provide practical asynchronous infrastructure.
• Incremental adoption: Cloudflare, Discord, and Figma illustrate that adopting Rust for a specific bottleneck can be more effective than rewriting an entire product.

The important caveat is that Rust doesn't automatically make software faster or more reliable. Architecture, algorithms, profiling, testing, and engineering experience still matter. Figma's account is especially instructive because it discusses both the gains and the trade-offs. How Mozilla’s Rust dramatically improved our server-side performanceSustainability with Rust

My recommended starting path

If your goal is to become proficient at writing production-quality Rust, I'd study these in order:

1. ripgrep - learn idiomatic Rust, error handling, modules, testing, and performance-oriented design in a manageable codebase.
2. Tokio - understand async/await, task scheduling, cancellation, and concurrent I/O.
3. Meilisearch - see how Rust skills combine into a complete service with APIs, storage, and application-level abstractions.
4. Pingora - study production networking and the engineering considerations behind high-throughput infrastructure.
5. Firecracker - tackle lower-level systems programming, isolation, and security boundaries once you're comfortable with the language.

If I had to pick just three: ripgrep for code quality, Tokio for ecosystem fundamentals, and Pingora for large-scale production engineering. Together, they offer an unusually strong cross-section of what Rust is good at and how experienced teams use it.

Rust has graduated from an experimental systems language to a core pillar of production infrastructure for many of the world's largest technology companies and open-source projects.

Top Companies Using Rust in Production

1. Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• The Use Case: Cloud infrastructure, serverless computing, and virtualization. 42 Companies using Rust in production - Sylvain Kerkour

• Key Projects:

• Firecracker: An open-source Virtual Machine Monitor (VMM) built specifically for serverless workloads. It powers AWS Lambda and AWS Fargate , providing microVM isolation with minimal memory footprints and blazing-fast startup times. 42 Companies using Rust in production - Sylvain Kerkour

• Bottlerocket: A lightweight, container-focused Linux operating system written largely in Rust. 42 Companies using Rust in production - Sylvain Kerkour

• Core Services: High-performance components of Amazon S3, EC2, CloudFront, and Route 53 rely on Rust for safety and efficiency. 42 Companies using Rust in production - Sylvain Kerkour

2. Cloudflare

• The Use Case: Edge computing, security, proxy routing, and low-latency networking. 42 Companies using Rust in production - Sylvain Kerkour

• Key Projects:

• Pingora: A heavily concurrent, asynchronous, memory-safe networked proxy framework written in Rust that handles trillions of requests daily at Cloudflare's edge (replacing parts of their older C-based infrastructure).

• Workers: Cloudflare's serverless edge computing platform heavily leverages Rust and WebAssembly to give developers secure, near-instant code execution worldwide.

3. Microsoft

• The Use Case: Operating systems, developer tools, and rewriting legacy C/C++ components to eliminate memory safety vulnerabilities. ImplFerris/rust-in-production - GitHub

• Key Projects:

• Windows Kernel: Microsoft has progressively introduced Rust into the core Windows kernel to handle low-level system tasks securely. ImplFerris/rust-in-production - GitHub

• Sudo for Windows: Microsoft officially rewrote the classic utility in Rust.

• Cargo / VS Code Ecosystem: Features like advanced code searching leverage high-performance Rust tools under the hood.

4. Google & Android

• The Use Case: Mobile operating systems, browser engines, and platform security.

• Key Projects:

• Android Open Source Project (AOSP): Google heavily integrated Rust into Android's system modules to reduce critical memory safety vulnerabilities. Google data indicates that shifting critical modules to Rust has dramatically slashed Android memory safety bugs. 15 Rust Projects To Sharpen Your Skills - CodeCrafters

• Chromium: Rust is used in components of the Chromium project to safely parse untrusted formats and handle networking. ImplFerris/rust-in-production - GitHub

5. Discord

• The Use Case: Real-time chat processing and backend performance scaling.

• Key Projects:

• Discord famously migrated parts of its core chat infrastructure (specifically, read states and high-throughput backend services) from Go to Rust. They chose Rust to eliminate latency spikes caused by garbage collection pauses and to handle millions of concurrent messages smoothly. 15 Rust Projects To Sharpen Your Skills - CodeCrafters

Top Open Source Projects Built in Rust

1. Tokio

• What it is: An asynchronous runtime for the Rust programming language. 7 Open Source Projects You Should Know - Rust Edition ✔️

• Why it matters: Tokio is the de facto underlying async engine for almost every major production-grade backend service written in Rust. It provides the event loop, task scheduling, and I/O primitives that allow systems to handle massive concurrency effortlessly. Best Rust Open Source Projects to Contribute to in 2026 - Rustify

2. Deno

• What it is: A secure, modern runtime for JavaScript, TypeScript, and WebAssembly. 7 Open Source Projects You Should Know - Rust Edition ✔️

• Why it matters: Built on top of V8 and Rust (using Tokio for its asynchronous layer), Deno showcases how Rust can orchestrate high-level dynamic languages while guaranteeing security and performance. 7 Open Source Projects You Should Know - Rust Edition ✔️

3. SWC & Turbopack

• What it is: Rust-based compilers and bundlers for the web ecosystem (developed heavily alongside Vercel). ImplFerris/rust-in-production - GitHub

• Why it matters: SWC replaced Babel in many enterprise pipelines, offering up to 20x faster compilation speeds. Turbopack serves as an incremental, high-performance successor to Webpack, demonstrating Rust's massive disruption in frontend tooling. ImplFerris/rust-in-production - GitHub

4. Polars

• What it is: A blazing-fast DataFrame library implemented in Rust and exposed to Python and Node.js.

• Why it matters: Built for data science and big data analytics, Polars competes directly with Pandas. It uses Apache Arrow memory layouts and multi-threaded query execution to process datasets faster and with lower memory footprints than traditional tools.

5. Ripgrep (rg)

• What it is: A line-oriented search tool that recursively searches directories for a regex pattern.

• Why it matters: Ripgrep is widely considered a masterclass in production Rust CLI design. By combining Rust's zero-cost abstractions, efficient SIMD-accelerated regex matching, and multi-threading, it routinely outperforms traditional tools like grep and ack.

What particular domain (e.g., backend web services, systems programming, or frontend tooling) are you looking to explore or build for?

Figma, Discord, and AWS are among the top industry examples of Rust in production**, alongside foundational open-source projects like Tokio and Servo.** GitHub - omarabid/rust-companies

Top Companies Using Rust in Production

Company	Production Use Case	Why It's a Great Example
Figma	Real-time multiplayer collaboration server	Migrated their synchronous Node.js server to Rust to handle massive memory constraints and scale concurrent document editing smoothly.
Discord	Read states, scaling backend services, and a C++ to Rust game-invite service migration	Switched a core service from Go to Rust to eliminate garbage collection pauses and achieve consistent p99 latency.
AWS (Amazon)	Firecracker (microVMs for Lambda/Fargate) and high-performance networking	Uses Rust heavily for critical cloud infrastructure where security, low memory footprint, and blazing-fast execution speeds are mandatory.
Cloudflare	Edge proxy (pingora) and security filtering	Replaced NGINX at the edge with a custom asynchronous Rust proxy handling millions of requests per second with high memory safety.

Leading Open Source Rust Projects

• • Tokio : The premier asynchronous runtime for Rust, powering high-performance networking, web servers, and distributed systems across the entire ecosystem.

• Servo : The high-performance, memory-safe browser engine originally spearheaded by Mozilla and now hosted by the Linux Foundation.

• Tauri : A lightweight alternative to Electron for building optimized desktop apps using web frontends backed by a secure Rust core.

• Bevy : A data-driven game engine built natively in Rust that showcases advanced trait systems, parallel scheduling, and high modularity. Best Rust Open Source Projects to Contribute to in 2026 | Rustify

If you'd like to narrow this down, let me know:

• Are you interested in a specific domain (e.g., web backends, embedded systems, CLI tools, or game development)?
• Are you looking for architectural case studies or code repositories to study?

Strong production examples include Mozilla (Rust in Firefox), Cloudflare (Pingora and its proxy framework), Google (Android and Chromium work), Dropbox (its file-sync engine), Discord (a service migrated from Go), and Microsoft (Windows and Azure components).(github.com)(serokell.io)(kerkour.com)(github.com)

Notable open-source projects include Firecracker, Pingora, Materialize, and g3proxy.(github.com)(github.com)(linkedin.com)

The strongest examples of Rust in production today are at major tech companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, and Cloudflare, alongside open source projects such as Firefox, the Linux kernel, and blockchain platforms like Solana and Polkadot. These deployments show Rust being used for security-critical, performance-sensitive infrastructure at massive scale.

🚀 Companies Using Rust in Production

Company	Rust Use Case	Why Rust?	Scale/Impact
Amazon(AWS)	Firecracker microVM (Lambda, Fargate), s2n-tls library, Bottlerocket OS	Memory safety, isolation, performance	Powers AWS Lambda & Fargate; millions of workloads daily [Rust at FAANG: How Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Use Rust in 2026
Google	Android AOSP components, Chromium internals	Reduce memory safety CVEs	Android adoption cut vulnerability density to 0.2 per million lines vs ~1000 in C/C++ Which Companies Are Already Running Rust in Production and What Were the Results - SoftwareSeni
Microsoft	Windows kernel drivers, Azure IoT Edge, networking stack	Eliminate memory safety bugs	Strategic adoption across Windows and Azure [Rust in Industry: Case Studies and Success Stories in 2025
Meta	Buck2 build system, WhatsApp backend	Developer productivity + safety	Buck2 is now Meta’s core build system [Rust at FAANG: How Amazon, Google, and Microsoft Use Rust in 2026
Cloudflare	Pingora proxy (replacing NGINX)	70% less CPU, 67% less memory	Handles 1 trillion requests/day Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why
Discord	Read States cache service	Avoid GC pauses	Supports 8M concurrent entries Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why
Dropbox	Nucleus sync engine	Reliability at scale	Replaced Python sync engine Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why
1Password	Core vault & sync engine	Security-critical storage	63% of core in Rust Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why

🌐 Open Source Projects in Rust

• Mozilla Firefox & Servo: Rust pioneered in browser engines, now core to Firefox’s CSS and media subsystems Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why.

• Linux Kernel: Since 2022, Rust is officially supported for kernel drivers and modules - the first non-C language accepted into the kernel Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why.

• GNU Coreutils (Rust reimplementation): A full rewrite of foundational Unix tools like ls, cp, and cat demonstrates Rust’s ability to match C performance while eliminating memory safety risks Rust in Production: Real-World Applications in 2026 - NanoTech Insight.

• Blockchain ecosystems (Solana, Polkadot): Rust is the backbone for runtimes and consensus-critical code, chosen for safety and performance in financial systems with billions in value locked Real Production Stories: Who Uses Rust, Who Uses Go, and Why.

• Brave Browser: Integrated Rust for its adblock engine, showing incremental adoption in large C++ codebases Which Companies Are Already Running Rust in Production and What Were the Results - SoftwareSeni.

• ClickHouse : Added Rust libraries to a predominantly C++ codebase, illustrating gradual adoption Which Companies Are Already Running Rust in Production and What Were the Results - SoftwareSeni.

⚖️ Key Takeaways

• Rust is not niche anymore: It’s powering AWS Lambda, Windows kernel components, and Android security-critical code.

• Adoption is incremental: Most companies integrate Rust into new components rather than rewriting entire systems.

• Rust’s unique value: Memory safety without garbage collection, predictable performance, and reduced vulnerability density compared to C/C++.

👉 If you’re evaluating Rust, the best lessons come from incremental adoption in critical components (like Cloudflare’s Pingora or Brave’s adblock engine) rather than wholesale rewrites. Would you like me to highlight smaller startups and niche projects that are also innovating with Rust, beyond the big tech examples?