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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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.
Smart Software Season 1 Trailer
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. (https://smr.tl/2Hyslu8)