Adopting Elixir: From Concept to Production

Adoption is more than programming. Elixir is an exciting new language, but to successfully get your application from start to finish, you’re going to need to know more than just the language. The case studies and strategies in this book will get you there. Learn the best practices for the whole life of your application, from design and team-building, to managing stakeholders, to deployment and monitoring. Go beyond the syntax and the tools to learn the techniques you need to develop your Elixir application from concept to production.

Learn real-life strategies from the people who built Elixir and use it successfully at scale. See how Ben Marx and Bleacher Report maintain one of the highest-traffic Elixir applications by selling the concept to management and delivering on that promise. Find out how Bruce Tate and icanmakeitbetter hire and train Elixir engineers, and the techniques they’ve employed to design and ensure code consistency since Elixir’s early days. Explore customer challenges in deploying and monitoring distributed applications with Elixir creator Jose Valim and Plataformatec.

Make a business case and build a team before you finish your first prototype. Once you’re in development, form strategies for organizing your code and learning the constraints of the runtime and ecosystem. Convince stakeholders, both business and technical, about the value they can expect. Prepare to make the critical early decisions that will shape your application for years to come. Manage your deployment with all of the knobs and gauges that good DevOps teams demand. Decide between the many options available for deployment, and how to best prepare yourself for the challenges of running a production application.

This book picks up where most Elixir books leave off. It won’t teach you to program Elixir, or any of its tools. Instead, it guides you through the broader landscape and shows you a holistic approach to adopting the language.

What You Need:

This book works with any version of Elixir.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Three Adoption Stories

Part 1: Concept
Chapter 2: Team Building
Chapter 3: Ensuring Code Consistency
Chapter 4: Legacy Systems and Dependencies

Part 2: Development
Chapter 5: Making the Functional Transition
Chapter 6: Distributed Elixir
Chapter 7: Integrating with External Code

Part 3: Production
Chapter 8: Coordinating Deployments
Chapter 9: Metrics and Performance Expectations
Chapter 10: Making Your App Production Ready