I'm pretty strongly on the Elixir train, but here's where I see its greatest weakness:
On many platforms, the best practice is to have stateless application servers, with separate stateful data stores. On the other hand, the big advantages of Erlang/Elixir are in managing state along with your application logic.
In a vacuum, that can be a big win. But I'm worried that the advantages are not enough to overcome the weight of tooling, services, and best practices built around the stateless model. For example, Heroku explicitly tells you to avoid application state, and Docker is built around a destroy-and-rebuild ethos.
For my project, Elixir/Phoenix is great as a "better Rails", but I know I'm only scratching the surface of the platform's strengths.
I don't want this to feel like an ad, but https://gigalixir.com should help in this area. Its a platform-as-a-service, like Heroku, but it's designed to encourage stateful application servers by not doing daily restarts and supporting hot upgrades. Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
Right now, the servers are on Google Cloud Platform in the us-central1 region. It's in multiple availability zones for reliability.
I highly doubt the service will be discontinued ever since traction looks good and we have plenty of funding, but Gigalixir and Heroku are almost interchangeable. The only difference really is that Gigalixir doesn't require a Procfile. However, if you fallback to Heroku, you'll lose clustering, hot upgrades, etc.
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I'm pretty strongly on the Elixir train, but here's where I see its greatest weakness:
On many platforms, the best practice is to have stateless application servers, with separate stateful data stores. On the other hand, the big advantages of Erlang/Elixir are in managing state along with your application logic.
In a vacuum, that can be a big win. But I'm worried that the advantages are not enough to overcome the weight of tooling, services, and best practices built around the stateless model. For example, Heroku explicitly tells you to avoid application state, and Docker is built around a destroy-and-rebuild ethos.
For my project, Elixir/Phoenix is great as a "better Rails", but I know I'm only scratching the surface of the platform's strengths.
I don't want this to feel like an ad, but https://gigalixir.com should help in this area. Its a platform-as-a-service, like Heroku, but it's designed to encourage stateful application servers by not doing daily restarts and supporting hot upgrades. Disclaimer: I'm the founder.
Very cool! Where do your servers run, and is there any callback planned in case your service gets discontinued?
Right now, the servers are on Google Cloud Platform in the us-central1 region. It's in multiple availability zones for reliability.
I highly doubt the service will be discontinued ever since traction looks good and we have plenty of funding, but Gigalixir and Heroku are almost interchangeable. The only difference really is that Gigalixir doesn't require a Procfile. However, if you fallback to Heroku, you'll lose clustering, hot upgrades, etc.
Sorry, typo. I meant fallback.