Engineering Elixir Applications (PragProg)

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Ellie Fairholm and Josep Giralt D’Lacoste

edited by Nicole Tache

The days of separate dev and ops teams are over—knowledge silos and the “throw it over the fence” culture they create are the enemy of progress. As an engineer or developer, you need to confidently own each stage of the software delivery process. This book introduces a new paradigm, BEAMOps, that helps you build, test, deploy, and debug BEAM applications. Create effective development and deployment strategies; leverage continuous improvement pipelines; and ensure environment integrity. Combine operational orchestrators such as Docker Swarm with the distribution, fault tolerance, and scalability of the BEAM, to create robust and reliable applications.

BEAMOps starts by building a solid foundation for your project. On the infrastructure side, see how to use Terraform before you even start coding to automate your deployment and operations. On the project management side, we show you how to use issues and milestones to simplify tracking; you’ll use this foundation as you go through the book, implementing each of the steps required to deploy a scalable Elixir application.

Now that you have a foundation, you can start building. Create a Phoenix LiveView application and explore mix releases. Make your deployments reliable with Docker. Continuously improve your codebase by implementing an efficient continuous deployment/integration pipeline with GitHub Actions. Scale the Phoenix LiveView application and operate a distributed BEAM
system in production using AWS EC2 nodes, AWS load balancers, and a remote Docker swarm. Recognize which application metrics should be collected and monitored, and set alerts when certain thresholds are met to ensure that your application auto-scales. Ship less code more often, and ensure it works!

The pragmatic BEAMOps approach that we teach in this book–an extension of the well-known DevOps paradigm—will help you become a multidisciplinary developer who is empowered to own each stage of the software delivery process. After reading this book, you’ll understand how to apply the BEAMOps principles in your daily work, creating reliable, scalable, and easy to understand applications in a cooperative team environment.

Ellie Fairholm is a full stack developer on the path to becoming a solutions architect. She excels at communication and believes that no topic is too difficult to learn. She is deeply passionate about making technology available to all, especially to those often underrepresented in the industry. She currently lives in the UK and is committed to working on projects that will one day change the world.

Pep G. D’Lacoste is the founder of BeamOps Software Consultancy, a company that takes a hands-on approach to simplifying BEAM projects and ensuring lasting sustainability by involving the whole team. He has been working with Elixir for 10 years and helped set up the Elixir Meetup in his home town of Barcelona. He now lives in the UK and is on a mission to empower developers and revolutionize the way technical teams operate.

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