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

Chapter 3. Processes – The Bedrock of Concurrency and Fault Tolerance

Having learned how to create a new project in Elixir, we will now dive into one of the cornerstones of Elixir (inherited from Erlang): processes. Understanding how to work with them is paramount to creating concurrent and fault-tolerant applications in Elixir. Your typical application will easily contain hundreds, if not thousands, of processes running concurrently.

If this last sentence has raised some concerns over running thousands of processes in a single machine, note that we're referring to Erlang VM processes, which are much lighter than Operating System (OS) processes. Throughout this chapter, and the rest of the book, process refers to an Erlang VM process—unless we directly mention OS process.

In this chapter, we will cover the following topics:

  • Erlang VM's inner workings and concurrency model
  • Creating processes and passing messages between them
  • Using processes to maintain state
  • Building one of the components of our...