ElixirConf 2021 - Mark Ericksen - Globally Distributed Elixir Apps on Fly.io

…into simplifying distributed postgres, and part of the reason for that is LiveView - to have a snappy LiveView app that will run and scale globally, you need app nodes distributed around the world and simple/reliable postgres scaling. This is a bit long, but worth the watch if you're interested in using Elixir/Phoenix/Liveview/Postgres globally: [video Didn't mean to come off like a Fly fanboy here; I'd love to find something even better than fly for elixir deployment.…

nope not a dumb question. With erlang distributed nodes (elixir compiles to erlang and runs on the BEAM) you can run the code on specific nodes. So say if you want to run code on a node geolocated in say Australia because it's closer to your database and return the results. This video shows it better link to this video

You'll have to put your db in the cloud but something like this setup would do what you want. You would leverage the distributed ability of elixir. link to this video That said writing the elixir app to your specific needs and deploying it will be a bit more complicated. Elixir releases and docker will be your friends in this endeavor.

distributed - you can connect two nodes and load and run code on another node from the first node and leverage the results on the first node, e.g. geographically dispersed nodes running code on a remote master and responding in low latency. Fly.io did a talk on this one. IME there aren't many languages that do this without significant setup or abstraction or additional libraries. Comparing something that is built into a language and is easy to use to kubernetes is laughable. Kubernetes takes a team of people to setup and maintain properly and is a considerable amount of abstractions itself. Erlang's version is just built in for free and ready for you to use. A better comparison might be so…

also because erlang is distributed, you can geodistrubute Elixir if latency is an issue. There was a really good fly.io demo about it link to this video

Erlang was used by Sony Erickson for their phone switches. The creators of Erlang thankfully convinced Erickson to release it as open source so we could all benefit. Elixir runs on the erlang VM so you have both erlang and Elixir at your disposal. IME the best use case for Elixir is Supervised Parallelism, i.e. when you need crash resistance with high concurrency. For me particularly I like it for things like APIs, Web Platforms (lower resource usage than other languages), and embedded devices via Nerves. However I've also used it on my endpoints to monitor them via Erlang's built in os_mon. Another usage is the distributed nature of erlang can allow you to do things like connect two n…