| HN Mirror

Totally get your point about AWS having free-tier services and compute never being free, regardless of the stack. My point wasn't that BEAM offers free compute, but rather that its inherent features can sometimes make certain AWS services redundant. For instance, Elixir has built-in fault tolerance with its actor model and supervision trees. This means that even when a process fails, it gets rebooted automatically without messing up other processes—kind of like what you'd use Auto Scaling and backup services for on AWS.

Similarly, distributed Erlang allows Elixir to run across multiple nodes. This could cut down the need for extra AWS instances or orchestration layers like Elastic Beanstalk. And when it comes to deployments, Elixir's hot code swapping can simplify what might otherwise require rolling updates or blue-green deployments with Elastic Load Balancers in the AWS ecosystem.

On the concurrency front, Elixir is designed for handling a high number of users and tasks simultaneously, which might reduce your reliance on EC2 or Lambda. Phoenix, Elixir's web framework, even has real-time capabilities baked in, so you don't need extra services like AWS WebSockets for that.

Finally, Elixir's actor model can serve as an in-memory message queue, which could potentially negate the need for something like AWS's SQS. So, while you're still incurring compute costs, the need for additional AWS services could be lessened, thereby simplifying your architecture and perhaps lowering overall costs.