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Elixir dev to prod

Elixir dev to prod

A talk about the road taken by us at Xerpa using Elixir since day-0.

Guilherme de Maio, nirev

September 23, 2016
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Transcript

  1. ?

  2. Stack Elixir 1.3 + Phoenix ClojureScript + Reagent PostgreSQL ElasticSearch

    Cassandra Others: C#, Python, C, Bash, Jenkins (In Production)
  3. Actually… 1. Why Elixir? 2. Assembling a team 3. Starting

    to Code 4. Going to production 5. Feature Cycles 6. Monitoring 7. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
  4. Why Elixir? Functional Programming; so what? • CPUs are not

    getting faster for single-thread apps • Concurrency is the next major thing for development • NO MORE FREE LUNCH (2005): • Java5 • WindowsXP • RoR launching on December
  5. Why Elixir? Functional Programming; so what? • What does it

    have to do with Functional Programming? • FP is easier for concurrency: 
 mainly because immutability + guarantees
  6. Why Elixir? Functional Programming; so what? • Actually, FP is

    a very old paradigm (even older than OOP): • 1960 → Lisp • 1973 → ML • 1980s → Lazy langs: Miranda, KRC, SASL, Orwell... • 1986 → Erlang • 1990 → Haskell 1.0
  7. Why Elixir? Functional Programming; so what? • Elixir embraces distributed

    computation and concurrency • Builds upon battle-tested Erlang • Enhances it with Metaprogramming and a arguably easier
 syntax • Created by the great VALINHO
  8. Assembling a Team or, How I learned Elixir • Few

    Elixir programmers around (what a surprise!) • But increasingly number of people interested in it
 and coming from all kinds of background • No “competition” • The first one is the hardest (lol)
  9. Starting to Code Elixir first impressions • mix is awesome

    • plenty of editors: atom, vim, IntelliJ 
 Emacs + Alchemist = <3 <3 <3 • Documentation is taken seriously • Quite easy to get acquainted to the language • OTP on the other hand….
  10. Starting to Code Elixir first impressions • Elixir takes the

    best ideas from a lot of languages: • |> from F# • Protocols e Metaprog from Clojure • the whole OTP from Erlang • Umbrella Apps from .NET • Ecto query DSL from LINQ • Doctest from Python …..
  11. Starting to Code Elixir first impressions • Everything is immutable.

    • There is a compiler • Elixir is pragmatic • Performance is great. GC is per-process • Documentation & tooling are take seriously • Macros • The runtime & OTP are AWESOME. 
 Every process is preempted. No bad neighbors.
  12. Going to Production We got this (somewhat) • Quick first

    way: Heroku + Elixir build pack • works great • just one server though and 
 we only used PostgreSQL at the time
  13. Going to Production We got this (somewhat) • Delivery Pipeline:

    • SemaphoreCI embraced Elixir quite early
 works great, very easy to configure • But we just love Jenkins • Did not test any other
  14. Going to Production We got this (somewhat) • Delivery Pipeline:

    • SemaphoreCI embraced Elixir quite early
 works great, very easy to configure • But we just love Jenkins • Did not test any other
  15. • Deployment, part 2: • PITA to use GraphicsMagick in

    Heroku
 (we have a buildpack for it on github) • Needed: • ElasticSearch • More control Going to Production We got this (somewhat)
  16. • Deployment, current: AWS • everything managed by Terraform +

    Ansible • Phoenix app compiled and packaged in .deb • deb is a no-brainer for us • no hot-deploy Going to Production We got this (somewhat)
  17. • # TODO: • Deployment with distributed Erlang nodes •

    Better understand how Elixir releases should be done Going to Production We got this (somewhat)
  18. Feature Cycles Building Stuff with Elixir • Core libs (Ecto,

    Phoenix, Plug) are 
 incredibly reliable! • releases are hard and not 12factor • hot code reloads are not that simple • The Ecosystem is really young
  19. Feature Cycles Building Stuff with Elixir • The Ecosystem is

    really young • no usable ElasticSearch client • (at the time) no json-api library • (at the time) no good auth libs • nothing to handle images
 github.com/Xerpa/exmagick :)
  20. Monitoring Everybody ships bugs • Suddenly, we were reminded that

    
 writing software IS HARD • And when going too fast, 
 things are going to brake
  21. Monitoring Everybody ships bugs • Plug n Play solutions are

    not that common:
 Honeybadger officially supports it
 AppSignal in alpha testing • the BEAM is highly instrumentable • Great talk about it by Milhouse @ ElixirConf2016
 https://confreaks.tv/events/elixirconf2016
  22. Takeways Was it worth? • Starting with a new, evolving

    language is hard • We had to figure out a lot of stuff ourselves • And we got it wrong a few times: • Trying to Haskellize Enums to use with Ecto • No good cassandra client (lacks a lot of features) • Not using Ecto.Type correctly from the start • Dates <o>
  23. Takeways Was it worth? • But we did get a

    lot of things right, and the platform is
 AMAZING ~3k commits, 700 PRs
  24. Takeways Was it worth? • Elixir is very promissing, and

    growing FAST • The community learns a lot from other languages • The community is helpful, open, inclusive and active • You have to be willing to deal with not-ready things and
 contribute yourself to the ecosystem • But even so, it’s highly recommended