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

Inside the BEAM


The Erlang VM is commonly known as BEAM (Bogdan/Björn's Erlang Abstract Machine). It was designed to run highly-reliable systems that usually have many nines of availability, and are pretty much always able to respond to client requests. We will now look at some of the design decisions behind the BEAM, and how they enable the creation and deployment of such systems.

A process is the unit of concurrent execution inside the BEAM. As we will see throughout this chapter, they are the building block that enables the creation of scalable, robust, fault-tolerant systems. Before diving into some runtime considerations for using processes, let's explore how processes interact with one another.

There's much discussion about whether the BEAM is a legitimate implementation of the actor model, as described by Carl Hewitt in the 1970s. Robert Virding, a co-creator of Erlang, has repeatedly stated that, while developing Erlang, they arrived at an implementation that resembles the actor model...