At work I run Elixir releases in Docker containers managed by Kubernetes, with two applications which are clusters of nodes. In my experience this setup works very well. Yes with containers you give up hot upgrades/downgrades, but I’m also of the opinion that unless you have a good reason to be doing hot upgrades, you don’t need the extra complexity, and Kubernetes makes blue/green and a/b style deployments easy to achieve. Without Kubernetes (or something like it), it’s probably much less interesting to use Docker.

A common problem I’ve read about is BEAMs hot-code-swap capabilities, which you seem to give up when using docker.

It seems like edeliver is the way to go; Plataformatec recently published a blog post about it and it looks easy to setup. It seems to me, unless you already have a Capistrano/Jenkins or Docker deployment pipeline setup, then it will be easier just to use edeliver.

Perhaps we can incorporate some of this information back into our deployment wiki thread.