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

Detecting errors by linking and monitoring processes


So far, we've focused mostly on the concurrency aspect of processes. However, processes are also used to create fault-tolerant and reliable systems that can continue to operate even in the presence of errors.

To have fault-tolerant applications, you must first recognize the existence of failures, most of them being unexpected. These failures range from one of our dependencies being down (such as a database) to having hardware failures. Moreover, if you're running a distributed system, you can experience other issues, such as a remote machine becoming unavailable, or being in the presence of a network partition. Regardless of the cause, these failures must be detected, so that we can limit their impact and hopefully recover from it without human intervention.

It's virtually impossible to anticipate all the possible scenarios that may grind your application to a halt. It's far more efficient to accept that anything can fail, and design your...