Any SaaS developers using Phoenix - Liveview - Ash

Phoenix Forum Questions / Help
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We are interested in pivoting from React ECO to Elixir - Livewire - Ash but really struggling to find any real world use cases that will help us with this :pray:

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I’m assuming by Livewire you mean LiveView?

Here is a “real world” demo app that may be of interest to you: GitHub - team-alembic/realworld: A fullstack Phoenix LiveView application with backend built with Ash Framework

Many thousands of people are shipped to production building SaaS products with Elixir/Phoenix/Liveview. Ash is newer, so we’re in the low hundreds on production deploys, but I hear consistent success stories from our users.

What kinds of things are you struggling to find? Are you looking for things like case studies?

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Classic schoolboy error :rofl: -yes Live View :+1:. Thank you for reaching out Zach. I am a non technical business owner that comes from the Sales & Design side of our business (Figma etc).Our developers whom I trust are talking about changing from our current Tech stack to Elixir. For me to get a grasp and understand the reasons, if this was React (Next Js, Drizzle, Trpc etc) I can watch a number of Youtubers and even with my limited technical knowledge understand the benefits of a particular pivot, however for this pivot it seems the information for non techy business owners is just not available or I am not looking in the right place and really wanted some help moving forward.

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Yeah, I can understand your pain on that one. Elixir has a couple things that ironically work against it on that front. Keep in mind everything I say here is just my perspective. The community is bigger than it seems and others will have valuable perspective to provide as well :slight_smile:

Specifically (and this is not an exaggeration, I’ve seen it first hand), most companies who make the jump to Elixir don’t shout it from the mountain tops. It’s a huge competitive edge in the velocity of feature development, cost reduction, etc.

Additionally, it’s a very productive community. The amount of folks producing the kind of content you’re looking for isn’t as high in this community, likely because its still a “medium-sized” community, with a heavy focus on consistently shipping value.

Some things that might help:

Phoenix/LiveView embodies the general value proposition of Elixir well. Do more with less, remove moving parts, make complex things simple. In this way, case studies about the Elixir language itself will be representative of the kinds of experiences you will have adopting Phoenix/LiveView.

Some good resources along those lines:

participating in the community as you are is awesome :slight_smile: Keep in mind a lot of folks here are busy technically minded folk, so it may take some pokes and prods to get the kind of high level stuff you’re looking for, but realistically ElixirForum has, IMO, the best overall sampling of the Elixir community, so this is the right place to be. Consider searching here for relevant conversations in the history as well.

Anecdotally, Alembic is shipping ambitious software at breakneck speeds for our customers using the Elixir/LiveView/Ash (or educating existing teams on how to do so themselves). Like to the point that engineering is outpacing product in some scenarios, which sounds like a fantasy land if you’ve built complex software before, but honestly its achievable with the right stack.

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Thank you again for the detailed response, Like most decisions its going to be down to a bit of skill and a whole lot of luck! Ironically we built an EDI SaaS solution using PHP about 7 years ago that just works, before moving to the hyped headless Ecommerce space using React which is great until it gets complicated and starts to fall down (Multi Tenancy for SaaS is a classic example of stretching the limits of the React ECO systems). I hope to post some more technical requests in the future.

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Here is a good mix of YouTube videos with easily digestible technical overviews and stories of companies adopting Elixir if you haven’t come across them yet, hope they help bridge the gap.

Inspiring Keynotes - Code Sync YouTube playlist

JosĂ© Valim on Elixir’s 12th Birthday | All Things Elixir
May 24, 2024

José Valim - Elixir, Erlang, Phoenix, Livebook
May 20, 2024

Keynote: Gang of None? Design Patterns in Elixir - José Valim | ElixirConf EU 2024
May 14, 2024

Mastering Elixir for Fintech Success: Insights from Todd Resudek
Apr 9, 2024

ElixirConf 2023 - Owen Bickford - Elixir’s Secret Ingredient
Nov 6, 2023

Lars Wikman - Introducing Elixir: Your entire web stack | Øredev 2023
Jan 22, 2024

Migrating to Elixir made easy with Ash - Barnabas Jovanovics
Nov 9, 2023

Keynote: How to sell Elixir (Again) by Evadne Wu | Code BEAM Lite Stockholm 2023
May 26, 2023

Concurrency in Action - Saơa Jurić
Jan 18, 2023

ElixirConf UY - Closing Keynote: Elixir Works Like My Brain - Andrea Leopardi
Nov 23, 2022

Getting My Full-Stack Back: Elixir and Phoenix.LiveView - Scott Hickey
Sep 28, 2022

Journey of Adopting Elixir - Wei Zeng
Jul 26, 2021

Phoenix LiveView for web developers who don’t know Elixir.
Nov 5, 2019

Michael Schaefermeyer - Buildings start-ups with Elixir | Code BEAM STO 19
Jul 13, 2019

The Soul of Erlang and Elixir ‱ Sasa Juric ‱ GOTO 2019
May 22, 2019

The ABCs of OTP - Jesse J. Anderson
Mar 24, 2017

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WOW - This will keep me going Thanks Juan :+1:

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My pleasure and welcome to the community.

Please don’t hesitate to let us know how you’re doing on your journey, ask any questions, post insights, etc.

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Like you said, trust them. If possible, trust them even more if they want to pivot from a mainstream stack to one that is not so mainstream, such as in this case. There can be no other reason other than productivity. A pivot in the other direction could have more nefarious motive, such as gaining more marketable skills in preparation of jumping ships.

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I worked with backends in Java and Python and decided to move to Elixir; it was the best decision ever!
I, personally, haven’t used Ash, but pure Phoenix, but from what I see it is a great tech too.
Once you go Elixir, you won’t be back.

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Thank you for your comment and you do make a great point about Developers wanting to jump ship and stay in their safe zone.

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Just to give some sense on productivity you can achieve once you know enough liveview

https://mathocrat.com/ this is a website I developed as a side project while working a full time job (job was in liveview too!)

This website currently can stream DRM videos and is deployed on barely 1 GB ram server with <5% CPU usage, 500MB RAM usage.

This is a pretty big win for me personally - considering what infra I would have to be setup just to achieve the above in other stacks.

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Thanks for your comments and Excellent work. So basically you can run this site on minimal cost compared to other Stacks? - One question how did you manage the Auth for each USER, this is always a challenge and can be costly add on for this type of project?

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Hey Neill. I see you’re in the UK as well, DM me and I’d be happy to share my experience. I was CTO at Stitched (https://www.stitched.co.uk, whole site is LiveView) for 5 years and led the rewrite of our CMS and customer facing site in Elixir - we kept a bunch of old ruby stuff around as we were a small team and the rewrite wasn’t justified.

While it could be a great idea, any rewrite is a fraught exercise and you really need to be sure it’s the right decision - regardless of stack.

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Hi Chris, Thanks for the comments. At the moments its for New SaaS Projects rather than any rewrite, although like you we have a few internal systems that we might use as a starting point.

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This may also be helpful: Adopting Elixir: From Concept to Production by Ben Marx, José Valim, Bruce Tate

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What are your requirements?
Why the change is needed?
Did the developers made a POC (Proof of concept)?
Why as non tech guy are you making this decision? Shouldn’t a CTO help you with this?

Always remember, you don’t have to change everything at once. You don’t have to understand the technical benefits of any language to know if it worth or not.

Ask for small improvements and then, measure what you need to measure to see if it is worth.

If you want to be convinced, do a POC, and that’s that.

Hopefully this helps :slight_smile:

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Thanks for your comments :slightly_smiling_face:

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Hi Neill,

I couldn’t see that this question has been answered, so I thought I would send you this link:

Auth generation lib

The lib comes standard with the mix tool.

Additionally, the datastore access tool ecto has a good write-up on multi-tenancy:

Ecto - multi-tenancy

I have built a couple of multi-tenant systems using elixir, each slightly different based on the project’s needs, and it has been pretty straightforward (Especially if using Postgres and leveraging its schemas).

Good luck

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