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by inferiorhuman
1298 days ago
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Frankly, I don't understand why it isn't much, much more popular.
It's been a few years since I walked away from Elixir and Phoenix for recreational projects so I've forgotten the finer points. The two things that bothered me the most were that a.) Erlang treats BSD as a second class citizen and b.) I got the sense that there was a lot of cargo culting going on. Getting an informed answer felt like it was just that much more difficult than with say Ruby.Professionally, as an ops monkey, I wouldn't want to be on the hook for supporting an Erlang or Elixir app. There's definitely a chicken-egg problem and I'd worry about finding coworkers who would be comfortable with Elixir, but there are also simply far too many moving parts. Like. Yeah okay channels are cool, in-place upgrades are cool, and a well disciplined team could make good use of them but to me that all sounds like a lot of very tempting footguns. All of a sudden I'm not just supporting an app, I'm supporting an entire runtime on top of Linux. I'd much rather deal with a single binary like e.g. go or rust provide, and I'd much rather not deal with Erlang processes and whatnot. That said the language itself is great. At the time I started dicking around with Phoenix I was working with a guy who was making a big push to use clojure for internal tooling. I liked the Elixir syntax which felt like a great mashup of Ruby and Clojure. |
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(Not trying to be argumentative.)
We have been quite ok just deploying our elixir stuff as containers per anything else (seems this is even common for go services - even though just the binary is enough theoretically). Connecting a cluster of beam-containers is not really any different to a cluster of go-containers, etc. Possibly when you last used Phoenix it didn't have built in releases (portable, compiled packaged dir + binary) - and a Dockerfile generator.
I likely lack the perspective you have, but I think you can discard a lot of the beams "classical" deployment story for something that's no different to Rails/Go/etc and I don't think you lose anything besides hot-code-upgrades which I think aren't really that needed in todays multi-node infrastructure. A container going down isn't any different to a raw beam node going down so its much-for-muchness.