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 5. Demand-Driven Processing

We have already seen how Elixir is especially suited to spawning million of processes. This capability lets the developer easily run simultaneous execution flows, only capped by the number of available processors on the machine.

Nevertheless, all this power may not be sufficient if a huge amount of data continuously flows to your application. If you don't process it fast enough, the message boxes of your processes will start to pile up and eventually use all your memory, bringing your application to a halt.

In this chapter we'll analyze how Elixir tackles this problem by controlling the rate at which data is processed with the recently introduced GenStage behaviour. Later on, we'll apply this behaviour to the ElixirDrip application to define the steps performed for each download and upload operation.

In the end, we will see how the Flow module sits on top of GenStage to provide its processing prowess in a streamlined fashion, with a set of functions comparable...