yordisprieto

yordisprieto

Elixir/Erlang and the Cloud Native Ecosystem

Hey folks,

What are your thoughts about the usage of Elixir/Erlang in Cloud Native systems (whatever that means, let’s use cncf.io for now, I think you get what I am trying to say, I hope so)?

Golang (predominantly), Java, and C++ dominate the ecosystem of k8s, cloud-native, and all those fuss words of nowadays (or honestly most software development nowadays).

I only found one project from cncf.io written in Elixir, and it wasn’t that well-maintained compared to the other ones.

It seems that the combination of Go CLIs for everything, fast language, small binary, and gRPC for interoperability makes a strong case to choose such toolkit for most projects like the CNCF projects.

From my experience, Elixir projects are focused on specialized solutions than embracing interoperability and reusable components.

I would like to know your thoughts about the reason why Elixir is not become widely adopted in those areas or ecosystems.

Thoughts?

Most Liked

gregvaughn

gregvaughn

I want to yell BINGO! because my buzzword bingo card just got a full row. No, I’m not sure what you’re trying to say and I’m guessing at what “Cloud Native” implies.

Go, Java, C++ all share the status of being OO/imperative mutable languages. You’ve got a “Cloud Native” environment optimized for that type of language, yet you’re surprised why languages that do not fit that category do not fit in well? Do you also ask why Haskell, Ocaml, Prolog, Forth, etc. are not well represented in your environment? Interoperability and reuse all require some common denominator of assumptions to work smoothly - the lowest common denominator. They discriminate against languages whose strength is something they never considered.

The Erlang VM and programming model, which Elixir adopts, was first developed in the late 80’s, and is effectively a progenitor to “Cloud Native”. They did it 30 years ago. Each GenServer is a microservice. Instead of JSON, they speak in the shared vocabulary of Erlang terms. They can be distributed among multiple physical servers or live within a single server with no change to the programming model. Instead of coding in YAML (via k8s) to manage restart policies, you use Elixir/Erlang – the same language as your primary business logic.

Elixir/Erlang represents a “cloud” within a single OS-level process. To wrap a single GenServer as a “microservice” managed by others is a step backward, IMHO.

28
Post #2
ityonemo

ityonemo

Right, so why would those big tech companies invest so much money in something that has been solved since the 80s?

Well also don’t forget that Sun literally spent billions of dollars marketing Java, which overshadowed any technical advantage that erlang could have brought to the scene in the 90s. Google was originally a Java shop, and kubernetes, while written in go, is built on top of java technology (https://youtu.be/4VNDjwzzKPo), and even if it weren’t, cargo culting google is totally a thing in tech.

LostKobrakai

LostKobrakai

There was a similar discussion here on the forums, where I tldr’ed the likely reason:

Where Next?

Popular in Discussions Top

jswny
I would like to better understand what the advantages/disadvantages of umbrella applications are compared to structuring your app as as s...
New
vans163
So useless benchmarks aside, Its possible to write a webserver that can serve 300k requests per second (perhaps more with optimizations)....
New
blackode
Elixir Upgrading is so Simple in Ubuntu and It worked for me Ubuntu 16.04 git clone https://github.com/elixir-lang/elixir.git cd elixir...
New
owaisqayum
I have a sample string sentence = "Hello, world ... 123 *** ^%&*())^% %%:>" From this string, I want to only keep the integers, ...
New
thojanssens1
It would be nice to be able to define a redirect from one route to another from the router.ex file. E.g.: redirect "/", UserController, ...
New
nunobernardes99
Hi there Elixir friends :vulcan_salute: In a recent task I was on, I needed to check in two dates which of them is the maximum and which...
New
AlexMcConnell
The reason that Rails is as popular as it is is because it’s very easy for relatively inexperienced developers to get a lot of work done....
588 19568 166
New
crabonature
I’m still quite new to Elixir. As I understand we got in Elixir “multi guards” as convention to simplify one large guard with or’s?: de...
New
shishini
I think this twitter post and youtube video didn’t get as much attention as I hoped I am still new to Elixir, so can’t really judge ...
New
Markusxmr
Since Drab has been developed for a while in the open, introducing the Liveview functionality in a way it happend appears to undermine th...
New

Other popular topics Top

danschultzer
None of the current solutions worked well for me, so I went ahead and built a user management system from scratch. This project took far...
548 29377 241
New
lastday4you
I wanted to check elixir version in phoenix because i found that my elixir is 1.5 but when i use Enum.chunk_by it said the function is un...
New
TunkShif
This post is an instruction guide to help you setup your Neovim for Elixir development from scratch. It includes general information on h...
274 41539 114
New
greenz1
I have a phoenix application from which a user can download multiple(5-6) files of size 1MB. I couldn’t find anything related to sending ...
New
Emily
I have VueJS GUIs with the project generated using Webpack. I have Elixir modules that will need to be used by the VueJS GUIs. I forese...
New
RisingFromAshes
I’ve read in another post that it may be possible with a router helper - but I couldn’t find an appropriate one, and tbh, I’m still just ...
New
komlanvi
Hi everyone, I was playing with phoenix liveView but I run into an issue. I have a form and want to validate each input text when the te...
New
AstonJ
Seen any cool LiveView demos, sample apps or examples? Please post them here! :003:
New
jononomo
For some reason my phoenix channels are working for me in my local dev environment, but as soon as I deploy via Docker, I get a 403 error...
New
lanycrost
Hi everyone! I need implement if…else if…else condition from my elixir code, and anymore of this control flow structures not work proper...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement