Saving millions with Elixir and Erlang

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Another post worthy of this section :003:

We slashed our DynamoDB costs by over 75% using Kinesis, DynamoDB streams, and Erlang/OTP (and now Elixir) to implement a global cache warming system. We present that system and two new open-source libraries for processing Kinesis and DynamoDB streams in a similar way using Elixir and Erlang.

AdRoll uses Erlang/OTP as the basis for several internal products, including a real-time bidding platform running on Amazon EC2. Erlang/OTP is the king of robust highly-concurrent soft real-time systems such as these.

This article describes how we substantially reduced the cost of an element of our real-time bidding platform (its DynamoDB usage) by implementing a global cache warmer using Kinesis and DynamoDB streams, written in Erlang. We later doubled the performance of that component by adapting it to use the Flow framework from the authors of Elixir.

We also present two new open-source libraries for doing this kind of processing using Elixir and/or Erlang.

Full article: Quaff that potion: saving $millions with Elixir and Erlang - NextRoll

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Very nice writeup. I especially like how they went into detail on the system-level architecture of a non-trivial system. I wonder if they’re using distributed elixir (already asked on the original article).

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