HACKER Q&A
📣 moomoo11

Anyone using elixir in production?


Looking for stories / experience / learnings from people who are using elixir on systems in production. I’ve read a few articles from discord and others who use elixir, would like to get a fresh more up to date perspective from software engineers about the pros and cons of using elixir. What problem are you solving and how does elixir help you? What’s the infra/deployment story like?

I’m currently learning it so I can build a custom notification system which it seems great for.

  👤 bluehatbrit Accepted Answer ✓
We use Elixir at DICE (https://dice.fm) for event ticketing and discovery. We have a lot of burst traffic when big name events go on sale and elixir handles it really well.

What do we like about it? We actually moved from Go and have nearly removed all Go code from the platform now. Because of our burst traffic we want a really efficient platform that gives everyone a good chance to get the tickets they want. Go gave us this but it wasn't great on dev productivity. Elixir has been a real sweet spot for us. You could build our product with any language/framework/platform really, but most of our devs are from a ruby background so Elixir was a natural choice for us when we knew Ruby would be too frustrating to make efficient enough to match our Go implementation.

We deploy onto k8s using helm charts and a custom deploy tool using a k8s operator. We use an umbrella project to organise our mono-repo and currently just re-deploy everything together as that's fine for our size of a team.

We're not using live view, but we are using absinthe (graphql library) and react frontend libraries. Our projects started before live view and the setup works well so we don't really have any need to change.

👤 innocentoldguy
The last 4 jobs I've had have all been (and continue to be) Elixir.

HG Insights

Divvy

Podium

GoSkip

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I also know these companies use Elixir:

PepsiCo

Adobe

Smartlogic

Cars

Felt

Dockyard

Massdriver

Pinterest

Discord

Amazon (though I doubt they know it broadly).