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

Umbrella projects


In the previous section, we started by defining and creating a sample Elixir application with Mix. By using the application's behaviour, we were able to start and stop it as a unit, and other applications could depend on it by pointing to this application in their dependencies.

As time passes, and your application gets bigger, you start thinking about how to divide it into smaller independent components with well-defined responsibilities. At this point, will you create a project from scratch for your recently extracted logic and add it as a dependency? Probably not, since, for now, those extracted components only make sense in the context of your original application.

An umbrella project helps you in this situation, because it allows you to have more than one application under the same Elixir project. Mix lets you achieve this by placing your individual applications under an apps folder in your umbrella project, while still allowing you to run each application separately...