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?

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.

Dan Ivovich from SmartLogic - Elixir in Production

Elixir Wizards