[nickjj]

> They could have just used different Java/Python libraries and changed the architecture for the same result.

Yep, their blog post is carefully worded to say "The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir" but they didn't mention how much of it is related to architecture or what specifically they did with Elixir to make things faster. It feels like a marketing piece for their consulting services.

I mean they put:

> Rewrote an #AWS APIGateway & #lambda service that was costing us about $16000 / month in #elixir. Its running in 3 nodes that cost us about $150 / month

They saved 100x here by moving from an expensive architecture (Serverless lambdas) to potentially reserved instances which are reasonably affordable, at least for cloud standards.

I remember once needing to parse XML in Python. I started with the easy approach of using the first XML parsing library I found which was xmltodict. Eventually I stumbled upon lxml which improved overall performance by 20x and I didn't have to rewrite much code at all. Sometimes it's easy to get big wins in your existing language if you know what the problem is.