Mastering Elixir

Leverage the power of Elixir programming language to solve practical problems associated with scalability, concurrency, fault tolerance, and high availability.

Key Features

• Enhance your Elixir programming skills using its powerful tools and abstractions
• Discover how to develop a full-fledged file server
• Understand how to use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application.

Book Description

Running concurrent, fault-tolerant applications that scale is a very demanding responsibility. After learning the abstractions that Elixir gives us, developers are able to build such applications with inconceivable low effort. There is a big gap between playing around with Elixir and running it in production, serving live requests. This book will help you fll this gap by going into detail on several aspects of how Elixir works and showing concrete examples of how to apply the concepts learned to a fully fledged application. In this book, you will learn how to build a rock-solid application, beginning by using Mix to create a new project. Then you will learn how the use of Erlang's OTP, along with the Elixir abstractions that run on top of it (such as GenServer and GenStage), that allow you to build applications that are easy to parallelize and distribute. You will also master supervisors (and supervision trees), and comprehend how they are the basis for building fault-tolerant applications. Then you will use Phoenix to create a web interface for your application. Upon fnishing implementation, you will learn how to take your application to the cloud, using Kubernetes to automatically deploy, scale, and manage it. Last, but not least, you will keep your peace of mind by learning how to thoroughly test and then monitor your application.

What you will learn

• Use Elixir tools, including IEx and Mix
• Find out how an Elixir project is structured and how to create umbrella applications
• Discover the power of supervision trees, the basis for fault-tolerance
• Create a Domain-Specifc Language (DSL) that abstracts complexity
• Create a blazing-fast web interface for your application with Phoenix
• Set up an automatic deployment process for the cloud
• Monitor your application and be warned if anything unexpected happens

Who this book is for

Mastering Elixir is for you if you have experience in Elixir programming and want to take it to the next level. This Elixir book shows you how to build, deploy, and maintain robust applications, allowing you to go from tinkering with Elixir on side projects to using it in a live environment. However, no prior knowledge of Elixir is required to enjoy the complex topics covered in the book.

Table of Contents

1. Preparing for the journey ahead
2. Innards of an Elixir project
3. Processes: The bedrock for concurrency and fault-tolerance
4. Powered by Erlang OTP
5. Demand-driven processing
6. Metaprogramming: Code that writes itself
7. Persisting Data using Ecto
8. Phoenix: A flying Web development framework
9. Find Zen through testing
10. Deploy on the Cloud
11. Keep an eye on your processes

André Albuquerque is a software engineer at Onfido, after working in the banking industry for seven years. He has a master's degree from Instituto Superior Técnico in distributed systems and software engineering, and, during his banking detour, he obtained a master's degree in economics. He is currently developing Onfido's microservices using Elixir and Ruby, learning every day about how applications can score and scale if we apply the correct tools and sound coding practices from the get-go. In his time off, he loves to build his own keyboards, play basketball, and spend time with his wife and son.

Daniel Caixinha is a software engineer at Onfido, where he is using Elixir to build resilient systems that can also handle the high growth of the business. After graduating from Instituto Superior Técnico, he joined the startup world, mainly using Ruby, but also got the chance to play around with Elixir. Upon joining Onfido, he got the chance to take Elixir more seriously, which made him fall in love with functional programming in general, and Elixir in particular. Besides building Elixir applications, he is fostering the use of Elixir, being also a member of the Lisbon Elixir meetup.