Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By : André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha
Book Image

Mastering Elixir

By: André Albuquerque, Daniel Caixinha

Overview of this book

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully ?edged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
Title Page
Dedication
Packt Upsell
Contributors
Preface
5
Demand-Driven Processing
Index

Containerizing our application


Before we start laying the foundation of how we deploy our application to the cloud, we need to have our application running inside containers. To introduce containers, let's first analyze the problem they try to solve.

To build and run our ElixirDrip project, we need Erlang, Elixir, and Node.js correctly installed and available in the current $PATH, ready to be used. To deploy the application in production, we need to make sure those dependencies have the exact same version and are installed in production in the exact same way, because only then we can be sure the application behavior will be the same.

Doing things like this is cumbersome and time-consuming, but not an impossible endeavor. If only we had a cleaner way of building the environment and then saving it, so we could reuse it at a later time, wherever we needed it. This is exactly what containers allow us to do.

Containers are lightweight wrappers for applications, which not only contain the applications...