I was in your shoes not that long ago. Here's a few things I use Elixir for currently: - Background job processing. Ruby can communicate with Elixir via BERT-R

I was in your shoes not that long ago. Here's a few things I use Elixir for currently: - Background job processing. Ruby can communicate with Elixir via BERT-RPC[0] so instead of deploying Redis, Sidekiq, etc. I can just setup a machine with Elixir and use BERT-RPC to send background jobs to Elixir from Ruby and process background jobs in Elixir. It's faster and easier to deploy than any Ruby background processing library I've ever used (and I'm extremely fond of Sidekiq btw!). - WebSockets. As others have pointed out, Rails isn't good for this and the programming models of other tools like Node.js just don't sit well with me. - Command line apps. It's easy to roll some basic CLI apps in Elixir for getting things done. Go is probably better suited for this overall but I still find Elixir nicer for this than Ruby. I hope I was able to give you a few ideas. Keep in mind Elixir is maturing fast and already has a lot of great libraries in both Elixir and from Erlang. I don't think we're that far way from having Phoenix being great for things Rails is predominantly used for (rendering HTML). 0 - https://github.com/mojombo/bertrpc https://github.com/mojombo/bertrpc