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Surprising development. I wonder if this will complement Gigalixir or compete with it. The ability to connect between nodes, avoid mandatory restart, avoid con

Surprising development. I wonder if this will complement Gigalixir or compete with it. The ability to connect between nodes, avoid mandatory restart, avoid connection limits and keep websocket connections alive easily gives compute engine a significant advantage over platforms like Heroku.

brightball 9y ago
Will be interesting to watch. Between Gigalixir and now this, it’s starting to look like GCP is positioning itself as the place to go for Elixir apps.
holografix 9y ago
Disclaimer: I just got a job with Heroku As far as I understand Heroku lets you connect between nodes (Dynos within a private space with dns discovery [0]) and also supports websockets [1]... for the mandatory restart, wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway? [0] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-dns-service-discovery https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-dns-service-disco... [1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websockets https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websockets Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  More info here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html Maybe you can convince the powers that be to do something about these. :)
- bostonvaulter2 9y ago
  The problem with private spaces is the pricing is out of reach of the vast majority of early-mid-stage startups since it is only available under the enterprise model.
- brightball 9y ago
  If I recall correctly, just turning on private spaces is not within most people’s price range. With most things you’d want stateless. Erlang/Elixir is designed with 3 built in databases, the ability to hold states on isolated processes and per process supervision and recovery. It’s a different animal than most.
- pselbert 9y ago
  Typically I design applications to be as stateless and tolerant of restarts as possible, as they do get restarted during deploys anyhow. That is a minor issue compared to the difficulties around connection restarts and communication between nodes. It is wonderful that Heroku now offers exec, which at least allows using observer and other remote debugging tools. The tooling keeps getting better—but there is no denying that it was designed for Ruby deployment, and working the BEAM has significant production differences.
- 59nadir 9y ago
  > wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway? > Sorry if I'm missing something obvious! That's exactly it. The value proposition for Erlang & Elixir is essentially that they provide great abstractions for managing state and they make great back-end languages for creating stateful applications.
jesses 9y ago
I'm the founder of gigalixir.com, and I haven't dug into this very deeply yet, but I'll just say that from my perspective, this is great regardless of if it competes or complements gigalixir.com. Anything that helps grow the Elixir community and helps drive adoption of Elixir will benefit everyone in this space.

brightball 9y ago

Will be interesting to watch. Between Gigalixir and now this, it’s starting to look like GCP is positioning itself as the place to go for Elixir apps.

holografix 9y ago

Disclaimer: I just got a job with Heroku As far as I understand Heroku lets you connect between nodes (Dynos within a private space with dns discovery [0]) and also supports websockets [1]... for the mandatory restart, wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway? [0] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-dns-service-discovery https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-dns-service-disco... [1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websockets https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websockets Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

enraged_camel 9y ago
More info here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html Maybe you can convince the powers that be to do something about these. :)
bostonvaulter2 9y ago
The problem with private spaces is the pricing is out of reach of the vast majority of early-mid-stage startups since it is only available under the enterprise model.
brightball 9y ago
If I recall correctly, just turning on private spaces is not within most people’s price range. With most things you’d want stateless. Erlang/Elixir is designed with 3 built in databases, the ability to hold states on isolated processes and per process supervision and recovery. It’s a different animal than most.
pselbert 9y ago
Typically I design applications to be as stateless and tolerant of restarts as possible, as they do get restarted during deploys anyhow. That is a minor issue compared to the difficulties around connection restarts and communication between nodes. It is wonderful that Heroku now offers exec, which at least allows using observer and other remote debugging tools. The tooling keeps getting better—but there is no denying that it was designed for Ruby deployment, and working the BEAM has significant production differences.
59nadir 9y ago
> wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway? > Sorry if I'm missing something obvious! That's exactly it. The value proposition for Erlang & Elixir is essentially that they provide great abstractions for managing state and they make great back-end languages for creating stateful applications.

jesses 9y ago

I'm the founder of gigalixir.com, and I haven't dug into this very deeply yet, but I'll just say that from my perspective, this is great regardless of if it competes or complements gigalixir.com. Anything that helps grow the Elixir community and helps drive adoption of Elixir will benefit everyone in this space.