In this episode of Running in Production, Gabriel Robertson talks about how he uses Phoenix and Elixir to build and deploy an ever changing internal web application that medical University employees, health officials and students use to access various systems and resources.

The application has a number of interesting security, up-time and browser compatibility requirements. It’s been running in production since 2017.

Topics Include

2:28 – Motivation for using Elixir and Phoenix
5:39 – Would you use Phoenix again if you rewrote your app today?
7:49 – Replacing Excel sheets and paper with a medical app that accesses an Oracle database
9:50 – Building an extensive security and permission system
10:24 – Supporting terminal browsers with server side templates and progressive JavaScript
11:18 – Employees, health officials and students use the app, it gets ~80 concurrent users
13:21 – Progressive enhancements with Drab (an Elixir library that competes with Live View)
16:51 – Using the BEAM and Cachex for caching data without using Redis
18:26 – Average page response times are in micro-seconds
18:39 – Docker is being used in development and production without Kubernetes or Swarm
20:45 – Using nginx as a reverse proxy, mainly for handling SSL certificates
21:52 – Assets are bundled with npm itself but Gabriel recommends using Webpack today
23:09 – Handling email transactions, error reporting, logging and metrics
25:48 – Everything is hosted on premises mainly for security reasons
27:50 – Running RedHat since it was installed before he got hired, but recommends Debian
28:56 – The Phoenix app runs on a VM with 40GB of storage, 8GB of memory and 6 CPU cores
29:19 – The primary server has 12TB of storage, 128GB of memory and 128 CPU cores
30:11 – The Phoenix app has 17,500+ lines of Elixir code spread across 150+ files
31:53 – It’s a pleasure to navigate, maintain and update the code base
34:04 – Configuration management is done with a VMware vSphere related tool
34:56 – Walking through a code deploy with Docker, Distillery and custom shell scripts
39:54 – 2 seconds of down time per deploy without a complex load balancer or orchestrator
41:03 – Handling disaster recovery by backing up the code and data every day
42:38 – Gabriel tried to bring down the app with a massive spike of traffic but it stayed up
44:37 – Best tips and advice? Love / learn Docker and use static typing when you can
48:19 – Separate your concerns and keep your functions short and simple
49:42 – You can find Gabriel on his site, GitHub, Twitter and on IRC at freenode #elixir-lang

Links

📄 References

⚙️ Tech Stack

🛠 Libraries Used

https://github.com/josefs/Gradualizer
https://github.com/OvermindDL1/gradualixir
https://github.com/jeremyjh/dialyxir
https://github.com/grych/drab
https://github.com/philss/floki
https://github.com/whitfin/cachex
https://github.com/bitwalker/distillery

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