Designing Elixir Systems with Otp: Write Highly Scalable, Self-Healing Software with Layers


Book Description

You know how to code in Elixir; now learn to think in it. Learn to design libraries with intelligent layers that shape the right data structures, flow from one function into the next, and present the right APIs. Embrace the same OTP that's kept our telephone systems reliable and fast for over 30 years. Move beyond understanding the OTP functions to knowing what's happening under the hood, and why that matters. Using that knowledge, instinctively know how to design systems that deliver fast and resilient services to your users, all with an Elixir focus. Elixir is gaining mindshare as the programming language you can use to keep you software running forever, even in the face of unexpected errors and an ever growing need to use more processors. This power comes from an effective programming language, an excellent foundation for concurrency and its inheritance of a battle-tested framework called the OTP. If you're using frameworks like Phoenix or Nerves, you're already experiencing the features that make Elixir an excellent language for today's demands. This book shows you how to go beyond simple programming to designing, and that means building the right layers. Embrace those data structures that work best in functional programs and use them to build functions that perform and compose well, layer by layer, across processes. Test your code at the right place using the right techniques. Layer your code into pieces that are easy to understand and heal themselves when errors strike. Of all Elixir's boons, the most important one is that it guides us to design our programs in a way to most benefit from the architecture that they run on. The experts do it and now you can learn to design programs that do the same. What You Need: Elixir Version 1.7 or greater.




Elixir in Action


Book Description

Summary Revised and updated for Elixir 1.7, Elixir in Action, Second Edition teaches you how to apply Elixir to practical problems associated with scalability, fault tolerance, and high availability. Along the way, you'll develop an appreciation for, and considerable skill in, a functional and concurrent style of programming. Purchase of the print book includes a free eBook in PDF, Kindle, and ePub formats from Manning Publications. About the Technology When you're building mission-critical software, fault tolerance matters. The Elixir programming language delivers fast, reliable applications, whether you're building a large-scale distributed system, a set of backend services, or a simple web app. And Elixir's elegant syntax and functional programming mindset make your software easy to write, read, and maintain. About the Book Elixir in Action, Second Edition teaches you how to build production-quality distributed applications using the Elixir programming language. Author Saša Jurić introduces this powerful language using examples that highlight the benefits of Elixir's functional and concurrent programming. You'll discover how the OTP framework can radically reduce tedious low-level coding tasks. You'll also explore practical approaches to concurrency as you learn to distribute a production system over multiple machines. What's inside Updated for Elixir 1.7 Functional and concurrent programming Introduction to distributed system design Creating deployable releases About the Reader You'll need intermediate skills with client/server applications and a language like Java, C#, or Ruby. No previous experience with Elixir required. About the Author Saša Jurić is a developer with extensive experience using Elixir and Erlang in complex server-side systems. Table of Contents First steps Building blocks Control flow Data abstractions Concurrency primitives Generic server processes Building a concurrent system Fault-tolerance basics Isolating error effects Beyond GenServer Working with components Building a distributed system Running the system




Functional Web Development with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix


Book Description

Elixir and Phoenix are generating tremendous excitement as an unbeatable platform for building modern web applications. For decades OTP has helped developers create incredibly robust, scalable applications with unparalleled uptime. Make the most of them as you build a stateful web app with Elixir, OTP, and Phoenix. Model domain entities without an ORM or a database. Manage server state and keep your code clean with OTP Behaviours. Layer on a Phoenix web interface without coupling it to the business logic. Open doors to powerful new techniques that will get you thinking about web development in fundamentally new ways. Elixir and OTP provide exceptional tools to build rock-solid back-end applications that scale. In this book, you'll build a web application in a radically different way, with a back end that holds application state. You'll use persistent Phoenix Channel connections instead of HTTP's request-response, and create the full application in distinct, decoupled layers. In Part 1, start by building the business logic as a separate application, without Phoenix. Model the application domain with Elixir functions and simple data structures. By keeping state in memory instead of a database, you can reduce latency and simplify your code. In Part 2, add in the GenServer Behaviour to make managing in-memory state a breeze. Create a supervision tree to boost fault tolerance while separating error handling from business logic. Phoenix is a modern web framework you can layer on top of business logic while keeping the two completely decoupled. In Part 3, you'll do exactly that as you build a web interface with Phoenix. Bring in the application from Part 2 as a dependency to a new Phoenix project. Then use ultra-scalable Phoenix Channels to establish persistent connections between the stateful server and a stateful front-end client. You're going to love this way of building web apps! What You Need: You'll need a computer that can run Elixir version 1.5 or higher and Phoenix 1.3 or higher. Some familiarity with Elixir and Phoenix is recommended.




Programming Ecto


Book Description

Languages may come and go, but the relational database endures. Learn how to use Ecto, the premier database library for Elixir, to connect your Elixir and Phoenix apps to databases. Get a firm handle on Ecto fundamentals with a module-by-module tour of the critical parts of Ecto. Then move on to more advanced topics and advice on best practices with a series of recipes that provide clear, step-by-step instructions on scenarios commonly encountered by app developers. Co-authored by the creator of Ecto, this title provides all the essentials you need to use Ecto effectively. Elixir and Phoenix are taking the application development world by storm, and Ecto, the database library that ships with Phoenix, is going right along with them. There are plenty of examples that show you the basics, but to use Ecto to its full potential, you need to learn the library from the ground up. This definitive guide starts with a tour of the core features of Ecto - repos, queries, schemas, changesets, transactions - gradually building your knowledge with tasks of ever-increasing complexity. Along the way, you'll be learning by doing - a sample application handles all the boilerplate so you can focus on getting Ecto into your fingers. Build on that core knowledge with a series of recipes featuring more advanced topics. Change your pooling strategy to maximize your database's efficiency. Use nested associations to handle complex table relationships. Add streams to handle large result sets with ease. Based on questions from Ecto users, these recipes cover the most common situations developers run into. Whether you're new to Ecto, or already have an app in production, this title will give you a deeper understanding of how Ecto works, and help make your database code cleaner and more efficient. What You Need: To follow along with the book, you should have Erlang/OTP 19+ and Elixir 1.4+ installed. The book will guide you through setting up a sample application that integrates Ecto.




Real-Time Phoenix


Book Description

Give users the real-time experience they expect, by using Elixir and Phoenix Channels to build applications that instantly react to changes and reflect the application's true state. Learn how Elixir and Phoenix make it easy and enjoyable to create real-time applications that scale to a large number of users. Apply system design and development best practices to create applications that are easy to maintain. Gain confidence by learning how to break your applications before your users do. Deploy applications with minimized resource use and maximized performance. Real-time applications come with real challenges - persistent connections, multi-server deployment, and strict performance requirements are just a few. Don't try to solve these challenges by yourself - use a framework that handles them for you. Elixir and Phoenix Channels provide a solid foundation on which to build stable and scalable real-time applications. Build applications that thrive for years to come with the best-practices found in this book. Understand the magic of real-time communication by inspecting the WebSocket protocol in action. Avoid performance pitfalls early in the development lifecycle with a catalog of common problems and their solutions. Leverage GenStage to build a data pipeline that improves scalability. Break your application before your users do and confidently deploy them. Build a real-world project using solid application design and testing practices that help make future changes a breeze. Create distributed apps that can scale to many users with tools like Phoenix Tracker. Deploy and monitor your application with confidence and reduce outages. Deliver an exceptional real-time experience to your users, with easy maintenance, reduced operational costs, and maximized performance, using Elixir and Phoenix Channels. What You Need: You'll need Elixir 1.9+ and Erlang/OTP 22+ installed on a Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows machine.




Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good!


Book Description

Erlang is the language of choice for programmers who want to write robust, concurrent applications, but its strange syntax and functional design can intimidate the uninitiated. Luckily, there’s a new weapon in the battle against Erlang-phobia: Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! Erlang maestro Fred Hébert starts slow and eases you into the basics: You’ll learn about Erlang’s unorthodox syntax, its data structures, its type system (or lack thereof!), and basic functional programming techniques. Once you’ve wrapped your head around the simple stuff, you’ll tackle the real meat-and-potatoes of the language: concurrency, distributed computing, hot code loading, and all the other dark magic that makes Erlang such a hot topic among today’s savvy developers. As you dive into Erlang’s functional fantasy world, you’ll learn about: –Testing your applications with EUnit and Common Test –Building and releasing your applications with the OTP framework –Passing messages, raising errors, and starting/stopping processes over many nodes –Storing and retrieving data using Mnesia and ETS –Network programming with TCP, UDP, and the inet module –The simple joys and potential pitfalls of writing distributed, concurrent applications Packed with lighthearted illustrations and just the right mix of offbeat and practical example programs, Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good! is the perfect entry point into the sometimes-crazy, always-thrilling world of Erlang.




Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir


Book Description

Learn different ways of writing concurrent code in Elixir and increase your application's performance, without sacrificing scalability or fault-tolerance. Most projects benefit from running background tasks and processing data concurrently, but the world of OTP and various libraries can be challenging. Which Supervisor and what strategy to use? What about GenServer? Maybe you need back-pressure, but is GenStage, Flow, or Broadway a better choice? You will learn everything you need to know to answer these questions, start building highly concurrent applications in no time, and write code that's not only fast, but also resilient to errors and easy to scale. Whether you are building a high-frequency stock trading application or a consumer web app, you need to know how to leverage concurrency to build applications that are fast and efficient. Elixir and the OTP offer a range of powerful tools, and this guide will show you how to choose the best tool for each job, and use it effectively to quickly start building highly concurrent applications. Learn about Tasks, supervision trees, and the different types of Supervisors available to you. Understand why processes and process linking are the building blocks of concurrency in Elixir. Get comfortable with the OTP and use the GenServer behaviour to maintain process state for long-running jobs. Easily scale the number of running processes using the Registry. Handle large volumes of data and traffic spikes with GenStage, using back-pressure to your advantage. Create your first multi-stage data processing pipeline using producer, consumer, and producer-consumer stages. Process large collections with Flow, using MapReduce and more in parallel. Thanks to Broadway, you will see how easy it is to integrate with popular message broker systems, or even existing GenStage producers. Start building the high-performance and fault-tolerant applications Elixir is famous for today. What You Need: You'll need Elixir 1.9+ and Erlang/OTP 22+ installed on a Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows machine.




Programming Phoenix


Book Description

Don't accept the compromise between fast and beautiful: you can have it all. Phoenix creator Chris McCord, Elixir creator Jose Valim, and award-winning author Bruce Tate walk you through building an application that's fast and reliable. At every step, you'll learn from the Phoenix creators not just what to do, but why. Packed with insider insights, this definitive guide will be your constant companion in your journey from Phoenix novice to expert, as you build the next generation of web applications. Phoenix is the long-awaited web framework based on Elixir, the highly concurrent language that combines a beautiful syntax with rich metaprogramming. The authors, who developed the earliest production Phoenix applications, will show you how to create code that's easier to write, test, understand, and maintain. The best way to learn Phoenix is to code, and you'll get to attack some interesting problems. Start working with controllers, views, and templates within the first few pages. Build an in-memory repository, and then back it with an Ecto database layer. Learn to use change sets and constraints that keep readers informed and your database integrity intact. Craft your own interactive application based on the channels API for the real-time, high-performance applications that this ecosystem made famous. Write your own authentication components called plugs, and even learn to use the OTP layer for monitored, reliable services. Organize your code with umbrella projects so you can keep your applications modular and easy to maintain. This is a book by developers and for developers, and we know how to help you ramp up quickly. Any book can tell you what to do. When you've finished this one, you'll also know why to do it. What You Need: To work through this book, you will need a computer capable of running Erlang 17 or better, Elixir 1.1, or better, Phoenix 1.0 or better, and Ecto 1.0 or better. A rudimentary knowledge of Elixir is also highly recommended.




Mastering Elixir


Book Description

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.




Modern Systems Programming with Scala Native


Book Description

Access the power of bare-metal systems programming with Scala Native, an ahead-of-time Scala compiler. Without the baggage of legacy frameworks and virtual machines, Scala Native lets you re-imagine how your programs interact with your operating system. Compile Scala code down to native machine instructions; seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO; control pointers, arrays, and other memory management techniques for extreme performance; and enjoy instant start-up times. Skip the JVM and improve your code performance by getting close to the metal. Developers generally build systems on top of the work of those who came before, accumulating layer upon layer of abstraction. Scala Native provides a rare opportunity to remove layers. Without the JVM, Scala Native uses POSIX and ANSI C APIs to build concise, expressive programs that run unusually close to bare metal. Scala Native compiles Scala code down to native machine instructions instead of JVM bytecode. It starts up fast, without the sluggish warm-up phase that's common for just-in-time compilers. Scala Native programs can seamlessly invoke operating system APIs for low-level networking and IO. And Scala Native lets you control pointers, arrays, and other memory layout types for extreme performance. Write practical, bare-metal code with Scala Native, step by step. Understand the foundations of systems programming, including pointers, arrays, strings, and memory management. Use the UNIX socket API to write network client and server programs without the sort of frameworks higher-level languages rely on. Put all the pieces together to design and implement a modern, asynchronous microservice-style HTTP framework from scratch. Take advantage of Scala Native's clean, modern syntax to write lean, high-performance code without the JVM. What You Need: A modern Windows, Mac OS, or Linux system capable of running Docker. All code examples in the book are designed to run on a portable Docker-based build environment that runs anywhere. If you don't have Docker yet, see the Appendix for instructions on how to get it.