Elixir and Phoenix are awesome and I’m hoping I can use them on my next project, however I’m an Elixir/OTP newbie and I’m not finding real examples of how Elixir apps with lots of moving parts are written, maintained and deployed.
For context, elixir-in-times-of-microservices by Jose is what first peeked my interest and I’ve bought/read every Elixir book I can get my hands on and this what we’ve come up thus far:
Umbrella OTP App containing:
API: phoenix and ecto serving REST and GraphQL – originally ecto was in separate app called DB, but then we settled on the API (and not the DB) is what the other apps/services interface with
FrontEnd: Main webapp our customers use (phoenix)
Admin: Backoffice webapp for staff (phoenix)
Integrations: This is where things go off the rails, we injest and transmit data, mostly in XML via HTTPS with over 3000 sources. An App per seems out of place, in most cases we have a REST or Soap client that listens to a queue and takes action, much like a background task. A lot of them will also spin up a GenServer per source (and this should be singleton across the entire cluster) and poll the source for data. We need to be able to control start/stop/pause per source as the sources like to add/remove data elements from time to time, best scenario would be able to update and deploy new code for a source without affecting the rest of the system. So we are thinking most of the 3000 integrations will be a Supervisor, with a GenServer (receiver) and a Module (sender).
Historically, each source ran as a windows service on a beefy single box, manually deployed, paused and updated separate from the web apps. (new services will run on Linux) The benefits/joy of being able to pull up :observer and peer into the source processes with state, or to remote iex and tinker would be epic.
Is anyone doing something like this in production that is willing to share how they structured the many integrations and deploying and upgrading a system like this. It’s possible we could be a trailblazer, but an existing production story would be invaluable.
Thank you