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


Throughout this chapter, we analyzed different ways of understanding what's happening under the hood of an Elixir project running in its production environment. Permanently feeding your dashboards with collected metrics allows you to quickly assess your application's current state.

With Prometheus and Grafana, you can then take a deep dive into your metrics data and understand behaviors and patterns that may fly under the radar at first sight. We also learned how to emit custom Prometheus metrics by enriching our Elixir code with instrumentation calls, when the metrics provided out of the box by the Prometheus suite of libraries weren't enough.

Sometimes, it is imperative to have an updated and informed view of the deployed code that is running. In these cases, you can connect to your application and look at it armed with the powerful Observer tool. After deploying the application on the cloud, connecting to it is more difficult, but not impossible, thanks to the incredible distributed...