– Motivation for using Elixir and Phoenix

– Would you use Phoenix again if you rewrote your app today?

– Replacing Excel sheets and paper with a medical app that accesses an Oracle database

– Building an extensive security and permission system

– Supporting terminal browsers with server side templates and progressive JavaScript

– Employees, health officials and students use the app, it gets ~80 concurrent users

– Progressive enhancements with Drab (an Elixir library that competes with Live View)

– Using the BEAM and Cachex for caching data without using Redis

– Average page response times are in micro-seconds

– Docker is being used in development and production without Kubernetes or Swarm

– Using nginx as a reverse proxy, mainly for handling SSL certificates

– Assets are bundled with npm itself but Gabriel recommends using Webpack today

– Handling email transactions, error reporting, logging and metrics

– Everything is hosted on premises mainly for security reasons

– Running RedHat since it was installed before he got hired, but recommends Debian

– The Phoenix app runs on a VM with 40GB of storage, 8GB of memory and 6 CPU cores

– The primary server has 12TB of storage, 128GB of memory and 128 CPU cores

– The Phoenix app has 17,500+ lines of Elixir code spread across 150+ files

– It’s a pleasure to navigate, maintain and update the code base

– Configuration management is done with a VMware vSphere related tool

– Walking through a code deploy with Docker, Distillery and custom shell scripts

– 2 seconds of down time per deploy without a complex load balancer or orchestrator

– Handling disaster recovery by backing up the code and data every day

– Gabriel tried to bring down the app with a massive spike of traffic but it stayed up

– Best tips and advice? Love / learn Docker and use static typing when you can

– Separate your concerns and keep your functions short and simple

– You can find Gabriel on his site, GitHub, Twitter and on IRC at freenode #elixir-lang