Elixir Wizards is an interview-format podcast, focused on engineers who use the Elixir programming language. Initially launched in early 2019, each season focuses on a specific topic or topics, with each interview focusing on the guest's experience and opinions on the topic. Elixir Wizards is hosted by Eric Oestrich and Sundi Myint of SmartLogic, a dev shop that’s been building custom software since 2005 and running Elixir applications in production since 2015. Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smartlogic.io/phoenix-and-elixir?utm_source=podcast)
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Meryl Dakin on Token Alchemist – Elixir Internals
Today on the show we continue our series on the inner workings of several different Elixir libraries and are happy to be joined by Meryl Dakin, Software Engineer at the Flatiron School and author of Token Alchemist. In this episode, we discover how Meryl got started with Elixir and what the process was like for her transitioning from Ruby to Elixir. We learn more about the internal functions of Token Alchemist within the school context and discuss the unique opportunities Meryl has discovered in Elixir, as well as the trickier language features that programmers are likely to experience in their learning process. Meryl also shares the challenges that Token Alchemist attempts to overcome – delving deeper into LTI, the Learn.co platform, OAuth and JSON. For all this and more, be sure to click play! Key Points From This Episode: Discover why Meryl first got started with Elixir. Learn more about the Flatiron Bootcamp for coders. Meryl’s experience in transitioning from Ruby to Elixir. The opportunities for concurrency and fault tolerance in Elixir. Discover the top three tricky language features in Elixir. The benefits of going back to the basics of Elixir. Find out the problems that Token Alchemist attempts to solve. Meryl explains LTI and the Learn.co platform for students. Learn more about custom parameters in Token Alchemist. The process of learning OAuth in Token Alchemist. What to consider when using LTI in Elixir. The benefits of resource link history ID’s in the LTI spec. Opportunities for you with Token Alchemist. And much more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: We Work — https://www.wework.com/ Flatiron School — https://flatironschool.com/ Elixir — https://elixir-lang.org/ Ruby — https://www.ruby-lang.org/en/ Learn.co — https://learn.co/ Meryl on LinkedIn — https://www.linkedin.com/in/meryldakin/ Meryl on Twitter — https://twitter.com/meryldakin Meryl on GitHub — https://github.com/meryldakin Token Alchemist on GitHub — https://github.com/meryldakin/token_alchemist Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Meryl Dakin.
Paul Schoenfelder on Distillery – Elixir Internals
Welcome back to show everyone and today in our exploration of Elixir libraries we are talking to Paul Schoenfelder! He is here to unpack Distillery, his own creation from the world of Elixir and tell us about how it works. We also discuss how Paul made the transition from bigger corporations into the startup world, his early experiences of different coding languages and the initial steps he took in writing Distillery. Paul is very honest about the unclear future of the library and he shares his hopes for it for the short term as well as clarifying its key concepts and functions. He gives great advice and directions for learning more about the resource and how you can help him and his projects out if you use them. For all this and then some, be sure to join us today for the show! Key Points From This Episode: * Paul's work background, language history and the last few years working Elixir. * The first library that Paul contributed to and created on his own! * What brought about the creation of Distillery. * Clarifying releases, compiling, generating, deployment and more. * Where to learn more and find out details about the library. * The first steps Paul took when writing this latest version of the Distillery. * Looking to the future of Distillery and its current best use cases. * Hot upgrades and who they can be useful to when it comes to Elixir. * Let Paul know if you are using or want to contribute to a project of his! * And much more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Smartlogic — https://www.smartlogic.io/ Paul Schoenfelder — https://github.com/bitwalker Bitwalker — http://bitwalker.org/ Distillery — https://hex.pm/packages/distillery DockYard — https://dockyard.com/ Erlang — https://www.erlang.org/ Phoenix — https://phoenixframework.org/ Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Paul Schoenfelder.
Bryan Joseph on ElixirScript – Elixir Internals
Today on the show we continue our series on the inner workings and various libraries of Elixir and are very happy to welcome Bryan Joseph of Revelry to talk about his very own ElixirScript. ElixirScript is essentially an Elixir to JavaScript compiler, allowing users to run Elixir online more easily. We ask Bryan what inspired this project and about some of the major challenges that have faced it. We also talk about the role of his company, Revelry in his career and work in open source. Bryan tells us about his very own conference, The Big Elixir and why you should be traveling to New Orleans to check it out! Other topics covered include the architecture of ElixirScript, binary pattern matching, Bryan's other experiences of libraries and his hopes for ElixirScript's future. For all this and then some, be sure to listen in today! Key Points From This Episode: Some background on Bryan, his work and how he got started with Elixir. What is ElixirScript? What does it do? How Brian got the idea! ElixirScript's architecture; the inner workings of the compiler. The major problems and challenges that face this task with JavaScript. Step one in the process; the conversion of concepts. Binary pattern matching and the implementation of strings. The things Bryan would do differently looking back on the product. Bryan's other experiences of libraries, contributions and fixes. Marketing, posting and getting the word out on ElixirScript. The current state of the project and hopes for the future. A little bit about The Big Elixir and what sets it apart from other conferences. And much more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Smartlogic — https://www.smartlogic.io/ ElixirScript — https://elixirscript.github.io/ Bryan Joseph — https://github.com/bryanjos Revelry — https://revelry.co/ The Big Elixir— https://www.thebigelixir.com/ Metaprogramming Elixir — https://www.amazon.com/Metaprogramming-Elixir-Write-Less-Code/dp/1680500414 Chris McCord — http://chrismccord.com/ Erlang — https://www.erlang.org/ ElixirCon — https://www.elixirlabs.net/events/elixircon-2018 Lonestar Elixir — https://www.lonestarelixir.com/ Operation Spark — https://operationspark.org/ Flatiron — https://flatironschool.com/ Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Bryan Joseph.
Brooklyn Zelenka on Witchcraft - Elixir Internals
Hey everybody and welcome back to Season 2 of the podcast! This season we will be talking about Elixir internals, libraries and the inner workings of the language. In our first episode we are very happy to be joined by Brooklyn Zelenka to start off our journey on the subject with an exploration of her very own Witchcraft. In this episode we talk to Brooklyn about her history with Elixir, how she got started and what attracts her to it. Brooklyn explains the influence that open source philosophy has had on her career in developing and from there she gives a pretty comprehensive introduction to what Witchcraft is, expanding its key concepts. Although this is quite a high level discussion about Elixir and Witchcraft, we are confident that with Brooklyn's expert help even our most uninitiated listener can get some benefit from our conversation. We also talk about type systems, property-based checking and Dialyzer, so for all of this and more make sure to join us as we kick things off for Season 2! Key Points From This Episode: A quick introduction to Brooklyn, where she works and how she got started with Elixir. The influence of open source and library contributions on Brooklyn's development. Getting to grips with Witchcraft; defining monads and functors. Why some of these scary terms do not need to frighten you. A few little things that differentiate Witchcraft and some surprising elements. The convenient guarantees that Witchcraft provides around your data structure. Why there is no type system baked into Elixir; overheads, inputs and outputs. Property-based checking and compile times in Witchcraft. Merging of Elixir and Dialyzer; benefits and problems. Getting in touch with Brooklyn and getting involved with Witchcraft and Elixir. And much more! Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode: Smartlogic — https://www.smartlogic.io/ Brooklyn Zelenka — https://github.com/expede Brooklyn Zelenka on Twitter — https://twitter.com/expede Brooklyn Zelenka Email — hello@brooklynzelenka.com Fission — https://fission.codes/ Elixir — https://elixir-lang.org/ Witchcraft — https://hex.pm/packages/witchcraft Dialyzer — https://github.com/jeremyjh/dialyxir Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Brooklyn Zelenka.
Season 2 Trailer
We’re excited to announce our season two topic, Elixir Internals. In this season we talk with developers behind some of the most popular Elixir libraries, including Witchcraft, ElixirScript, Distillery, Ecto, and more!
Elixir in Production Recap
With this season over, we bring Dan Ivovich back to talk about what we learned. Dan Ivovich - Director of Development Operations @ SmartLogic 00:43 - Why are you using Elixir in production? 01:20 - Advantages / disadvantages of Elixir 02:38 - How do you deploy? 03:48 - Zero downtime deploys 05:40 - Clustering 06:56 - Elixir App performance 09:00 - Background task processing 10:36 - Common Libraries 14:40 - 3rd Party Services 16:16 - Do you have a story where Elixir saved the day in production? 17:56 - OTP features 18:31 - Tip to developers Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.
Jeffrey Matthias from Community - Elixir in Production
We talk with Jeffrey Matthias from Community about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Jeffrey Matthias - Community (https://www.community.com/) Find Jeffrey elsewhere online: http://github.com/idlehands https://twitter.com/idlehands 0:47 - Give us a quick overview of the Elixir projects you have in production. 3:29 - Why are you using Elixir in production? 6:04 - What are some of the high level advantages / disadvantages of Elixir, from your perspective? 10:14 - What do you use to host your Elixir app? Linode, AWS, DO Heroku Enmesos mesos How do you deploy your application? Ansible Deploy scripts Distillery 14:19 - Are you able to get zero downtime deploys? If so, how? 17:06 - Do you cluster the application? If so, how? 22:53 - How does your Elixir App perform compared to others in your environment? Response time Throughput Jobs/hr 25:01 - How are you solving background task processing? 29:17 - What libraries are you using? Phoenix 33:53 - Third party apps 37:28 - Do you have a story where Elixir saved the day in production? 40:42 - If you could give one tip to developers out there who are or may soon be running Elixir in production, what would it be? Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Jeffrey Matthias.
Jay Ashe from Cava - Elixir in Production
We talk with Jay Ashe from Cava about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Jay Ashe - Cava (https://cava.com/) Find Jay elsewhere online: https://twitter.com/jgashe 0:40 - Give us a quick overview of the Elixir projects you have in production. CAVA is a fast-casual mediterranean restaurant chain with 75 stores across the US. Elixir and phoenix power CAVA’s online ordering platform (order.cava.com and the CAVA app). We’ve got a REST (and websockets) api sitting behind react and our mobile apps, and we use phoenix templates for some of our back of house systems. 1:11 - Why are you using Elixir in production? We have from the start! The application was originally implemented by Chris Bell and his team at madebymany. Chris, by the way, has a fantastic talk from ElixirConf 2016 that goes into our architecture and how we use elixir and OTP constructs to model our business logic. Chris will occasionally talk about the CAVA project on his Elixir podcast, ElixirTalk. Chris’ Talk - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDhU-2NWJ8 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkDhU-2NWJ8) 1:58 - What are some of the high level advantages / disadvantages of Elixir, from your perspective? Advantages: Elixir and Phoenix gives you rails-esque productivity/developer experience that scales. I think phoenix channels are a great example of this. Build a channel with complex real-time functionality and let it scale effortlessly. Disadvantages: Hiring and onboarding, depending on your mindset, can be difficult. If you’re used to hiring for experience in your stack, its just going to be more difficult. Lately we’ve started doing one-hour weekly knowledge shares that cover elixir basics and are closely tied to our usage of them. So, here’s a test case, and here are all of the test helpers that we have set up that will help you write that test. We also just sent a new Elixir dev to lonestar elixir 3:59 - What do you use to host your Elixir app? Heroku How do you deploy your application? Heroku-buildpack-elixir https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir (https://github.com/HashNuke/heroku-buildpack-elixir) 4:44 - Are you able to get zero downtime deploys? - As close as possible! We get that out of the box with heroku. When we deploy, heroku won’t point traffic to the new dyno until the app is healthy. We make extensive use of Phoenix channels over websockets, and our clients will reconnect automatically and transparently. 5:10 - Do you cluster the application? Nope. 5:52 - How does your Elixir App perform compared to others in your environment? I can’t really talk about numbers here, but Elixir is not at all our bottleneck. We don’t have other production applications 6:25 - How are you solving background task processing? Quantum for cron jobs, genservers for everything else. We’re running a single elixir application that handles all synchronous and async processing 7:07 - What libraries are you using? Phoenix Phoenix_swagger for API documentation that integrates with controller tests https://github.com/xerions/phoenix_swagger (https://github.com/xerions/phoenix_swagger) Ex_rated for rate limiting calls to our integrations https://github.com/grempe/ex_rated (https://github.com/grempe/ex_rated) Timex and calendar for datetime support with timezones https://github.com/bitwalker/timex (https://github.com/bitwalker/timex) A combination of httpotion and httpoison for HTTP clients, but im interested in trying Mint https://github.com/ericmj/mint (https://github.com/ericmj/mint)https://github.com/appcues/mojito (https://github.com/appcues/mojito) Bamboo for transactional emails, like order confirmations etc https://github.com/thoughtbot/bamboo (https://github.com/thoughtbot/bamboo) 8:59 - 3rd Party Services (i.e. Email, Payment Processing, etc) Sendgrid for email, Google for geocoding, slack for some internal alerting of application health, LevelUp for payments. https://www.thelevelup.com/ (https://www.thelevelup.com/) 10:07 - Do you have a story where Elixir saved the day in production? Yes and no. So I could tell this story by explaining the issue we saw and the underlying cause at the same time, but I think it would be more fun to tell it like our team experienced it. One day at lunch our application started going down. Lots of 500 errors. Red lights flashing. Panic ensuing. Lunch is our busiest time of day, so 1) we thought it was load related and 2) we really needed to fix it None of our traditional resources (database, cpu, memory) were constrained and our integrations that were synchronous were fine. Our logs were littered with errors from an analytics integration that ran asynchronously on genservers, but it didn’t seem related because we could see the error logs at times when our application was otherwise healthy. The team that used the analytics didn’t have a pressing need for them, and we deprioritized fixing the issue because the bug we were working on was so much more important (that’s foreshadowing). I spent a little time looking at websockets, but I was easily able to match the load of the websocket portion of our application on my local machine with no degradations in performance (thanks, phoenix), so that was out. At this point the issue was going on every day at lunch and I was getting annoyed at seeing the logs from the analytics integration when debugging, so I spent like 15 minutes finding and fixing the issue (a bad API key, basically) Voila, issue gone. Time to grab some lunch. We spent a while coming up with an explanation for this. Eventually we learned about max_restarts on a supervisor. By default, if a process crashes 3 times in 5 seconds, the process won’t be restarted again. So if another process (like the one handling a web request) tries to call that process that wasn’t restarted, the caller would crash, and we’d start to get 500 errors, customers couldn’t log in, mass confusion. So there are a few takeaways from this story: For a while, elixir saved the day in production. - A supervision tree prevented failures from the analytics process from affecting customers, until the scale of our failures exceeded the max_restart level. - Our supervision tree needed some love though, clearly. - Monitor your resources. CPU is a resource, but calls to another API are also a resource and can get unhealthy too. 15:00 - Are you using any cool OTP features? GenServers, definitely. There’s lots we can do asynchronously especially in terms of our integrations. One process per store is a cool model that scales well and keeps issues isolated to a single store. 15:50 - If you could give one tip to developers out there who are or may soon be running Elixir in production, what would it be? If you’re on a small team, Heroku or a similar provider might give you a lot of value in terms of infrastructure you can set up and forget. Learn more about how SmartLogic uses Phoenix and Elixir. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Jay Ashe.
Frank Hunleth - Elixir in Production
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 (https://nerves-project.org/) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Frank Hunleth.
Mark Ericksen - Elixir in Production
We talk with Mark Ericksen from Elixir Mix about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Mark Ericksen - Elixir Mix (https://devchat.tv/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, exmachina, prometheusex 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Mark Ericksen.
Brooklyn Zelenka from SPADE Co. - Elixir in Production
We talk with Brooklyn Zelenka from SPADE Co. about their current and past Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Brooklyn Zelenka - SPADE Co. (https://spade.builders/) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Brooklyn Zelenka.
Todd Resudek from Weedmaps - Elixir in Production
We talk with Todd Resudek from Weedmaps about their current Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Todd Resudek - Weedmaps (https://weedmaps.com/) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Todd Resudek.
Lonestar ElixirConf 2019 Lunchisode
We sat down with numerous developers, including José Valim and Chris McCord, during the Saturday lunch at Lonestar ElixirConf 2019 (https://lonestarelixir.com/2019/). Hear what they had to say about the state of Elixir! Guests: José Valim - Creator of Elixir (https://elixir-lang.org/) Chris McCord - Creator of Phoenix (https://phoenixframework.org/) Paul Schoenfelder - Creator of Distillery (https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery), Timex (https://github.com/bitwalker/timex), Libcluster (https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster), and many others Chris Keathley - Host of Elixir Outlaws (https://elixiroutlaws.com/), developer at Bleacher Report (https://bleacherreport.com/) Amos King - Host of Elixir Outlaws (https://elixiroutlaws.com/) Jim Freeze - Organizer of ElixirConf (https://elixirconf.com/), ElixirConf EU (http://www.elixirconf.eu/), and others Susumu Yamazaki - Creator of Hastega (https://github.com/zeam-vm/hastega) Brian Cardarella - CEO of Dockyard (https://dockyard.com/) Osa Gaius - Engineer at Mailchimp (https://mailchimp.com/) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8)
Ryan Billingsley from ClusterTruck - Elixir in Production
We talk with Ryan Billingsley from ClusterTruck about their current Elixir projects and how they are deployed. Ryan Billingsley - ClusterTruck (https://www.clustertruck.com/) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Ryan Billingsley.
Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic - Elixir in Production
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. (https://smartlogic.io/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 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCUKQnkjajo)) Pg2 (http://erlang.org/doc/man/pg2.html) - process groups Mnesia (http://erlang.org/doc/man/mnesia.html) distributed database (beware!) “Just sending messages to pids because Erlang is great” Swarm (https://github.com/bitwalker/swarm) / Horde (https://github.com/derekkraan/horde) 12:40 - How do we handle background tasks? Started with verk (https://github.com/edgurgel/verk) Recently becoming more comfortable with spinning up GenServers (https://hexdocs.pm/elixir/GenServer.html) “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 (https://phoenixframework.org/) - web framework Ecto (https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html) - sort of an ORM Distillery (https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery) - for releases Bamboo (https://github.com/thoughtbot/bamboo) - for sending emails Quantum (https://github.com/c-rack/quantum-elixir) - for task scheduling Timex (https://github.com/bitwalker/timex) - for dates and times, and timezones Cachex (https://github.com/whitfin/cachex) - for caching 18:20- What third party integrations have we attempted Stripe Square Twilio Mindbody Always building our own clients. Using HTTPoison (https://github.com/edgurgel/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 (http://erlang.org/doc/man/gen_tcp.html) Mnesia dets (http://erlang.org/doc/man/dets.html) 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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8) Special Guest: Dan Ivovich.