Mark Ericksen - Elixir in Production

Elixir Wizards

We talk with Mark Ericksen from Elixir Mix about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed.

Mark Ericksen - Elixir Mix

Find Mark elsewhere online:
https://twitter.com/brainlid
https://brainlid.org/

00:32 Intro
0:58 Mark intro
Developing a long time. C#, then Rails. Webforms were terrible. Rails is “Wow, this is how web development should be… I moved across the country to work with this technology”
The Rails Community is strong. Dave Thomas got Mark into Elixir

2:48 What Elixir projects do you have in production?
A Rails app and a number of Elixir Micro-liths

4:29 Why do you use Elixir

6:45 Trends in moving from Ruby and Rails to Elixir
Ruby Syntax
Pattern Matching
Concurrency primitives
Fault Tolerance and a functional paradigm
Erlang/OTP

6:48 Comparing Elixir community to Ruby community to C# community

8:27 Any disadvantages to using Elixir?
Building releases. Configuring releases.
mix.release

10:13 Where are you hosting these bad boys?
AWS
Kubernetes in Production. So Fresh.
Docker and Distillery 2.0 Releases
Yaml files and Bash Scripts
Makefiles

10:53 What else are you using besides docker

12:36 Helm and Ksonnet.

13:55 Deploys

14:39 Clustering

17:50 How do your Elixir apps compare to the Ruby apps?
Big Elixir Apps

20:00 How Mark handles background jobs
Easy to write yourself with BEAM primitives

21:27 Libraries - Quantum, Bamboo, ex_machina, prometheus_ex via Eric’s influence

23:29 Third party integrations. Major ones were easy. Banks were bad.
Literally had to FTP files. Had to use java to write xml spreadsheets. The horror.

25:26 Has Elixir ever saved the day for you in Production?

29:42: Cool OTP features
30:57 Tips to developers
35:36 Where to find Mark

Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.

Special Guest: Mark Ericksen.

Links:

• libcluster
• Exq
• absinthe
• dataloader