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.

Most Liked

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.

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.

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.

Where Next?

Popular in Questions Top

sen
Hi All, I set a environment variables in dev.exs , like below code. when i start server, how can i set the ${enable} value? thanks. d...
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
shahryarjb
Hello, I have map which I want to convert it to string like this: the map: %{last_name: "tavakkoli", name: "shahryar"} the string I ne...
New
nobody
How to bind a phoenix app to a specific ip address? could not find anything about that, nowhere, unfortunately, but for me this is quite...
New
earth10
Hi, I’m just starting to build a side-project with Elixir and Phoenix and doing some basic test with Elixir alone. What strikes me is th...
New
stefanchrobot
What’s the safe way to decode a JSON string into a struct? I want to avoid calling String.to_atom. Jason.decode can give me a map with st...
New
baxterw3b
Hi guys, i’m new in the Elixir world, and i have to say, that i love it! i’m having some problem to understand anonymous functions with ...
New
vonH
When I run the Plug and I recompile I wind up having to use Ctrl C to quit iex and start again. Witht the help of rlwrap I can use the cu...
New
sergio_101
I am VERY much an elixir newbie. I have taken one elixir course and one phoenix course on Udemy. During that course, I saw the instructor...
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

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
aadeshere1
I have a another noob question about loop. Since elixir is immutable, while loop is not directly possible. total = 10 while total != 0 ...
New
senggen
Erlang/OTP 25 [erts-13.2.2] [source] [64-bit] [smp:8:8] [ds:8:8:10] [async-threads:1] 15:22:35.803 [error] gen_event {lager_file_backend...
New
albydarned
Hello all! I am typing this post from my new MacBook Pro with the M1 chip. I’m loving it so far, and will probably use it as my daily dr...
New
skosch
To my knowledge, put_in, Map.update etc. all have the one limitation of not automatically creating intermediate keys when needed (for exa...
New
fireproofsocks
Forgive me if this is obvious, but how does one delete a database record WITHOUT selecting it first? Ecto.Repo — Ecto v3.14.0 has exampl...
New
baxterw3b
Hi guys, i’m new in the Elixir world, and i have to say, that i love it! i’m having some problem to understand anonymous functions with ...
New
belgoros
I’m not a pro in using Regex and can’t figure out why the following behaviour happens, especially if we take into account the difference ...
New
KronicDeth
Elixir plugin for JetBrain’s IntelliJ Platform (including Rubymine) This is a plugin that adds support for Elixir to JetBrains IntelliJ...
289 36128 110
New
WestKeys
Currently suffering from paralysis by [HTTP client] analysis. This is rather unusual in Elixirland as there tends to be consensus on the ...
New

We're in Beta

About us Mission Statement