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

GenServer


We know by now that the Erlang VM lets millions of processes live happily on their own, and communicating with them is only possible via message exchange, which is the process of enqueueing messages on each process mailbox.

This interaction between processes can be seen as a client-server interaction, in the sense that a process asks the other, by enqueuing a message on its mailbox, to do something on its behalf. To implement the service, the server process would have to devise its receive loop, passing around its internal state, handling unexpected messages, and so on. While implementing the server-side logic, one also has to think in advance of possible edge cases that may corrupt the server's internal state or place it in a deadlock situation, unable to process any more requests.

While tackling their telecommunication projects at Ericsson, and after implementing a lot of server processes, the fine folks at Ericsson found a common set of traits that were always ending up being...