Elixir Wizards

We talk with Frank Hunleth from the Nerves core team about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Frank Hunleth - Nerves Find Frank elsewhere online: https://twitter.com/fhunleth https://github.com/fhunleth 0:53 Frank intro 2:02 Give us a quick overview of the Elixir projects you have in production. 4:25 Why are you using Elixir in production? 8:00 What are some of the high level advantages / disadvantages of Elixir, from your perspective? 9:25 What hardware do you deploy to? 12:05 How do you get code to hardware after deployment? 13:47 How do you secure the code? 18:12 Do you cluster? If so, how? How does your Elixir App perform compared to others in your environment? 22:45 How does Elixir compare to other languages? 26:15 More information about Nerves Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Frank Hunleth.

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.

We talk with Brooklyn Zelenka from SPADE Co. about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Brooklyn Zelenka - SPADE Co. Find Brooklyn elsewhere online: https://twitter.com/expede https://github.com/expede 1:08 - Brooklyn’s Background Brooklyn's background and experience with Elixir is deep. Huge open source contributor. Got started in Elixir just after Phoenix got to 1.0. 1:53 - Worked on several Elixir projects in production. 2:43 - Why she got into Elixir. Real Time More performant than Rails. Great documentation Industrial-grade 4:38 - When you wouldn't use Elixir. Easy to get stakeholder buy-in. Just point to WhatsApp. Elixir is made for 2019 CLI tools Repl-driven development TDD tools built in by default All the best practices we have today are built in. 7:14 - Where has Brooklyn hosted her apps? Heroku for POC's. AWS for production. Dockerized because "kubernetes is the new hotness" 9:40 - Do you do any clustering? Load balanced above. AWS load balancing is very standard. They're well understood and have a nice developer experience. 10:29 Are you able to get any zero downtime deploys? Zero downtime deploys. Awesome but impractical. Rolling deploys are easier and usually more appropriate. Some requirements make it valuable. Erlang error states. Exceptional. Allows you to build for the happy path. Don't worry about error handling all the time. Witchcraft and dark magic. Monads. Poke around the standard library. 12:50 - How does Elixir compare to Rails in terms of response times, and other aspects? 15:32 - What libraries do you use and what have you built? 22:41 - Any cool features of OTP you are using? 25:36 - One tip to developers new to Elixir Build up a peer-to-peer cli chat from scratch in one GenServer. Find her at @expede everywhere on the internet. Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Brooklyn Zelenka.

We talk with Todd Resudek from Weedmaps about their current Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Todd Resudek - Weedmaps Find Todd elsewhere online: https://twitter.com/sprsmpl https://github.com/supersimple 00:00 - Intro 01:06 - Tom introduces himself 02:54 - What is Weedmaps? 04:33 - Overview of the Elixir projects you have in production. 06:25 - Why are you using Elixir in production? 07:21 - Advantages / disadvantages of Elixir 10:37 - What do you use to host your Elixir app? 10:50 - How do you deploy your application? 11:22 - Are you able to get zero downtime deploys? 12:00 - Do you cluster the application? 13:00 - How does your Elixir App perform compared to others in your environment? 14:15 - How are you solving background task processing? 16:40 - What libraries are you using? 21:09 - 3rd Party Services 23:56 - Do you have a story where Elixir saved the day in production? 24:22 - Are you using any cool OTP features? 24:39 - Tip to developers 25:12 - Where you can find him 25:32 - Outro Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Todd Resudek.

We sat down with numerous developers, including José Valim and Chris McCord, during the Saturday lunch at Lonestar ElixirConf 2019. Hear what they had to say about the state of Elixir! Guests: José Valim - Creator of Elixir Chris McCord - Creator of Phoenix Paul Schoenfelder - Creator of Distillery, Timex, Libcluster, and many others Chris Keathley - Host of Elixir Outlaws, developer at Bleacher Report Amos King - Host of Elixir Outlaws Jim Freeze - Organizer of ElixirConf, ElixirConf EU, and others Susumu Yamazaki - Creator of Hastega Brian Cardarella - CEO of Dockyard Osa Gaius - Engineer at Mailchimp Spectating: Bruce Tate and Ben Marx 00:00 - Intro 01:47 - LoneStar begins 02:03 - Panelists introduce themselves 09:15 - Where is Elixir going? 10:14 - Releases 19:04 - The issue with hype 26:30 - Osa Intro 29:00 - Define lists 40:00 - How can Elixir displace Java? Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.

We talk with Ryan Billingsley from ClusterTruck about their current Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Ryan Billingsley - ClusterTruck Find Ryan elsewhere online: https://twitter.com/ryanbillingsley https://horriblenight.com/ 00:00 - Fade In 00:50 - Ryan introduces us to ClusterTruck. 02:00 - How did Ryan get into Elixir? 03:12 - Where does the name ClusterTruck come from? 04:17 - Tell us about the projects you have in production. 05:50 - Why are you using Elixir in these projects. 08:11 - Disadvantages of using Elixir 09:22 - Comparing Elixir with Ruby, Node, Go. 11:38 - Where is ClusterTruck hosting their applications? 15:03 - Kubernetes? 16:03 - Zero Downtime Deployments? 16:42 - Do you do any clustering? 18:06 - How does Elixir perform compared to other project environments you’ve worked in? 19:52 - How are you solving background task processing? 21:09 - Other libraries? 23:34 - Other third party integrations? 25:46 - Is there a time Elixir has saved the day in Production? 27:47 - Cool OTP Features! 29:45 - Tips to devs thinking about running Elixir in Production. 31:17 - Outro Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Ryan Billingsley.

We talk with developers from the team here at SmartLogic about our current practices on deploying Elixir and Phoenix in production. Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. 00:00 - Fade In 00:30 - Introductions to Eric, Dan and SmartLogic Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic Eric Oestrich - Developer, Elixir Lead @ SmartLogic Justus Eapen - Full stack developer @ SmartLogic Introduced to Elixir by an old colleague. 1:20 - What Elixir projects do you have in production? Several client projects in production. Several Mobile Apps with APIs powered by Phoenix and Elixir. Baltimore Water Taxi. A digital marketplace. And more! 1:57 - Advantages and disadvantages to using Elixir. We made the switch when a colleague was stoked about Functional Programming and introduced us to Elixir. We were won over by the performance and rich feature sets, OTP, etc. 2:43 - Where are we hosting our Elixir Apps? Heroku AWS Linode Digital Ocean 6:20Deployment process, tools, scripting Ansible - for underlying VPS’s, servers, and more recently deployment itself. (Similar to Capistrano). Distillery Mix.release 7:18 - Zero Downtime Deployments Old school load balancers and rolling restarts 7:46 - What are the performance metrics like? Comparatively. Ruby ends up with memory leaks. That doesn’t happen with Elixir. Memory utilization is flat and low no matter what. “Phenomenal response times” 8:54 - How does Eric think about clustered applications in Elixir? Going Multi Node (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo) Pg2 - process groups Mnesia distributed database (beware!) “Just sending messages to pids because Erlang is great” Swarm / Horde 12:40 - How do we handle background tasks? Started with verk Recently becoming more comfortable with spinning up GenServers “The language itself is built to be concurrent.” 15:06 What libraries are we using in prod? First thing: You don’t need a whole lot because the language is so well designed. Phoenix - web framework Ecto - sort of an ORM Distillery - for releases Bamboo - for sending emails Quantum - for task scheduling Timex - for dates and times, and timezones Cachex - for caching 18:20- What third party integrations have we attempted Stripe Square Twilio Mindbody Always building our own clients. Using HTTPoison 19:58Has Elixir ever saved the day in production? It’s saved many days by PREVENTING ISSUES. Systems are architected for reliability and fault-tolerance. 21:48 - Where do supervision trees come from? What is OTP? OTP is an Erlang standard lib Includes supervision trees, genservers, ETS, and a lot of stuff we don’t even know about! gen_tcp Mnesia dets 23:43- Tips for devs considering running elixir in production. Jump in and read the docs Understand how systems boot, distillery releases, config providers, etc. “Good server monitoring hygiene” “DIVE IN!” 19:54 Outro Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.

Welcome to the first season of Smart Software with SmartLogic. We'll be interviewing several companies about how they use Elixir in Production this season. In this preview episode, we introduce ourselves and some of the topics we’ll be covering. Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir.