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

Summary


In this chapter, we applied different OTP constructs to our ElixirDrip application and we are now able to tackle a broader array of problems armed with this new set of tools. These tools are not fully-fledged solutions or frameworks, but rather tools that help you build your applications, not getting in the way. Elixir also sports the mantra of providing tools, not solutions, an expression coined by Robert Virding, one of the creators of Erlang.

This chapter highlighted some of the great tools Elixir puts at your disposal. A lot has been said, and many different concepts were introduced:

  • We started by implementing a GenServer-based cache worker to keep the most recent media in memory for faster access. To keep the memory usage in check, we decided to expire the cache process after a while, and we achieved this by sending a delayed:expire message to the process.
  • We also analyzed the simpler,GenServer-based,Agent abstraction, for those cases when we just need to spawn a process to store...