pmjoe

pmjoe

Elixir suitable for building a API gateway?

Is Elixir suitable for building a API gateway like Kong? The main driver is the latency, throughput can be archived with more machines, but latency don’t.

The server should have a very low latency, be stable and support plugins. I’m very inclined to use Go because it’s fast and easy. But i don’t know if i can have the same stability guarantees from Elixir.

First 5 of 5 Posts Switch mode

NobbZ

NobbZ

Go gives you nothing near to the stability guarantees that a properly built elixir application gives you. Supervision trees are totally rocking.

I can’t say anything about response time comparison in both, since those really depends on how well the application is crafted, not that much the language.

I can tell though that the go runtime stops the world for garbage collection, while the BEAM does garbage collection on a per process base.

pmjoe

pmjoe OP

Indeed, Elixir supervisors are awesome, but Go is getting much better, i think that in 1.11 it gonna be fully preemptive. In theory, Elixir should have a much better latency because the GC don’t stop the world, but, in pratice, Go has way better latency.

Take a look here.

Qqwy

Qqwy

TypeCheck Core Team

An Elixir application will probably respond a lot better than a Go application when put under increased load.

Of course, what exactly happens in real life is something you can only find out by extensive benchmarking. I find the claim ‘in practice, Go has better latency’ very sketchy. It’s a nice benchmark that you linked to, but in real life, an application also performs some work besides immediately returning a response to a request. (Which this benchmark does not do)

That said, Elixir is definitely better than Go when talking about:

  • Stability. Even if Go becomes pre-emptive, it can by no means claim the same fault-tolerancy as Elixir does unless it will also start to work with the Actor Model. Also, Distributed Erlang (and the newer Swarm and Partisan) are absolutely amazing tools to manage multi-server scalability and fault tolerancy.
  • Hot-code reloading. AFAIK, Go is compiled and does not allow you to do this. Especially when you might want to include streaming features in your API, this is the difference between all in-progress API requests being broken or being able to continue along.
  • Stateful APIs. The ability to spin up GenServers that manage every need fo your user(s) in a specific context are conceptually really easy to understand, and are a lot faster than writing everything to a database in-between requests. This makes Elixir really well-suited for e.g. multiplayer games, communication platforms, etc.
gon782

gon782

I would add Inspectability to that list. The amount of tooling you have out of the box to inspect a single process is far beyond what Go can give you. For any one of those multiplayer game rooms, chat rooms, what have you, you can open up observer and see exactly what the internal state is, in order to debug it (or just for shits and giggles).

Go doesn’t have a way to refer to single threads via a general identifier, much less a non-intrusive (or any) way to see what the internal state of a thread is. To inspect the state of something, you’ll have to actually make that whole business yourself, which will just be another point of failure for you. observer will tell you exactly what’s there and how it relates to the other processes in the process tree.

StefanHoutzager

StefanHoutzager

There are already api gateways built in elixir. See GitHub - Accenture/reactive-interaction-gateway: Create low-latency, interactive user experiences for stateless microservices. · GitHub Introducing RIG – the Reactive Interaction Gateway https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wNF51mmnsMo
I’m reading a bit about api gateways because my new customer works wit microservices and uses a gateway.

— All posts loaded —

Where Next?

Trending in Questions Top

stjefim
Hello! Suppose you are building workflow (order / task / payment) processing system with the following requirements: Each workflow con...
New
jonnycharles
I’m in search of an Elixir library that offers PDF generation capabilities similar to Ruby’s Prawn. While there have been discussions abo...
New
spammy
I’m looking to build a personal workflow to quickly deploy web applications written in elixir/phoenix, for local consumption (ie not on t...
New
silverdr
Using Phoenix.LiveView.TagEngine as an EEx.Engine is deprecated! To compile HEEx, use Phoenix.LiveView.TagEngine.compile/2 instead. Sta...
New
dli
Before I dive in myself, did anyone successfully sprinkle Hologram into their existing LiveView app? Looking for hints regarding: Addi...
New
bottlenecked
Hi all, I wanted to ask how the community is dealing with post-release steps. Today we have Ecto migrations, which make sure that the db...
New
michallepicki
I am using Oban and occasionally, shortly after a deployment, a handful of jobs can fail because of dependency on other parts of the syst...
New

Other Trending Topics Top

JesseHerrick
Hey, I’m Jesse and I’m the main contributor behind Dexter, a full-featured, lightning-fast Elixir LSP optimized for large codebases. It s...
New
jimsynz
Beam Bots (or just BB for short) is a framework for building fault-tolerant robotics applications in Elixir using familiar OTP patterns. ...
New
Damirados
Hello everyone. After busy few months I am happy to announce v0.1.0 of Emerge & Solve. They are GUI (Emerge) and State management (S...
New
ausimian
Emily is an Elixir library that runs Nx computations on Apple’s MLX. Install it as the default Nx backend and Nx, defn, Axon, Nx.Serving,...
New
type1fool
I just stumbled on a newly redesigned elixir-lang.org. :tada: It looks like @Software_Mansion did the work, and I think it is generally a...
New
juhalehtonen
There has been a thread to discuss the Stack Overflow Developer Survey on this forum every year since 2018, so here’s yet another one for...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement