[ram_rar]

I have a ton of respect for José Valim and the Elixir core team, I have to say: Elixir just doesn’t mesh well with the kind of infrastructure tooling that’s become standard today. The ecosystem has been growing impressively and there’s a lot to admire, but its philosophy often feels at odds with containerized, Kubernetes-based deployments.

Elixir promotes a "do it all in one place" model—concurrency, distribution, fault tolerance—which can be powerful, but when you try to shoehorn that into a world built around ephemeral containers and orchestration, it starts to crack. The abstractions don’t always translate cleanly.

This opinion comes from experience: we’ve been migrating a fairly complex Elixir codebase to Go. It’s a language our team knows well and scales reliably in modern infra. At the end of the day, don’t get too attached to any language. Choose what aligns with your team’s strengths and your production reality.

[ch4s3]

If you can't get Elixir to work well in k8s, you're simply doing it wrong. Yeah you can build a lot of what k8s offers on the BEAM on a bare server but you don't have to at all. Elixir offers modern telemetry that works really well with pretty much any monitoring tool, and give you a lot of introspection into the internals of the VM if you need it. "Let it fail" works just fine in k8s, you can run a supervision tree in a container and have it manage process restarts internally just fine, its just an added layer of fault tolerance. Sure, you can't easily have long running stateful processes if you're doing a lot of blue-green deployments, but you probably don't need to do that most of the time.

If you don't know Elixir and the BEAM well, of course you're going to have a bad time. That's true of any language.

[benmmurphy]

phoenix live view is effectively built around the assumption that the server process never dies and never restarts. its a very dubious model for a production deployment.

> what happens when the server restarts / connection is lost / server dies?

> you lose all of the current client state but you can work around this by persisting all the client state somewhere.

> oh, so why am i using live view again?

[jon-wood]

Sure, if your a company which is fully bought into ephemeral containers running on Kubernetes then Elixir is probably not going to be a great fit for you. I have once introduced it into a company like that and eventually the same thing happened, the application got rewritten in a language that fits the paradigm better.

If I were starting a new company today though I'd probably go with Elixir, and then I simply wouldn't bother with containers, Kubernetes, and schedulers. Just run some servers and run the application on them, let them cluster, and generally lean into the advantages.

[em-bee]

most people/companies who think they need kubernetes don't actually need it. you are not google or amazon. and with erlang/elixir that's likely even more true.

[asa400]

> if your a company which is fully bought into ephemeral containers running on Kubernetes then Elixir is probably not going to be a great fit for you

As a community, we have got to stop saying this stuff. It's false. Nothing about Elixir or k8s precludes using the other. Elixir applications can and do run just fine in containers and k8s deployments. In fact, they're complementary: https://dashbit.co/blog/kubernetes-and-the-erlang-vm-orchest...

[Towaway69]

Elixir has a Ruby on Rails approach which is kind of all in one. Not everyone’s cup of hot chocolate.

Erlang is low level, lightweight processes and message passing - perfect for micro-services and containerisation.

What Erlang lacks are high level web-oriented packages, i.e. markdown conversion, CSS and JavaScript packaging, REST (not quite true: cowboy is fantastic) - for which though Erlang was never intended.

However the cool thing is that you can combine both in the same project, allowing you to have high level Elixir and low-level process management in one project. This is possible because both use the same virtual machine - BEAM.

[davidw]

Erlang isn't really that much lower level than Elixir. The Elixir syntax is just a bit different and they've improved a few things like string handling. Processes are still processes.

[lknuth]

We look at K8s more like "the Cloud Operating System". Many of its capabilities are more valuable for other runtimes, but that doesn't mean that Elixir is a bad fit with it.

For example, the Erlang VM clustering can make use of K8s for Service Discovery. You can do ephemeral containers and use readiness probes to create a " hand over" period where new instances can sync their data from old, about-to-be-replaced instances.

[sisve]

Did you do hot updates? I ser that is mention in the post, but I thought the community has walked away from it? Or at least that its mixed feelings about it?