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BusinessDevelopmentElixir


EIGHT FAMOUS COMPANIES USING ELIXIR—AND WHY THEY MADE THE SWITCH

Karolina Kurcwald

January 20, 2020

What is Elixir? It is a functional and dynamic programming language first
released in 2012, so it’s still relatively new. 

Since then, it’s been gaining popularity because it’s highly scalable, reliable,
and great for microservices and cloud computing. Let’s look at a handful of
major-league companies that decided to introduce Elixir into their architecture
and see what they gained from the change.

Elixir is based on Erlang VM, a 20-year-old virtual machine built to support
robust, concurrent, and distributed software. With its Phoenix framework, Elixir
is used in virtually any industry and for any application. Recently, it’s been
gaining popularity as an enterprise-level software in:

 * telecoms
 * banking
 * ecommerce
 * advertising
 * instant messaging
 * IoT

The language is perfect for projects that need to support concurrency and low
latency, handle a lot of traffic, and scale easily. Actually, in the foreword to
“Programming Elixir ≥ 1.6: Functional |> Concurrent |> Pragmatic |> Fun”, a
recent book by Dave Thomas, the creator of the language, José Valim, describes
concurrency as the backbone of Elixir, adding that its biggest value is “freeing
programmers from antiquated concurrency mechanisms.”

The benefits of Elixir also include high fault tolerance, reliability, and a
tidy, modern syntax. It’s proven itself useful for distributed systems like
Blockchain projects, embedded systems, as well as real-time apps using instant
messaging, video chats, or financial apps.

Furthermore, there are multiple additional architectures, services, and
frameworks that build upon Elixir. Some examples include:

 * Phoenix—a framework for creating REST APIs and HTML applications with Elixir
 * Ecto—a database wrapper and query language for Elixir
 * ExUnit—Elixir's built-in unit testing frameworks
 * Mox—a mocking library for use in automated tests
 * Exq—a job-processing library for Elixir.

Thinking of making the switch yourself? Take a look at just a few of the most
prominent examples of highly successful companies that have employed Elixir in
their major projects in recent months—and the results they managed to achieve
with it.




1. PINTEREST: HALF THE SERVERS, 10 TIMES LESS CODE

According to the company's own data, Pinterest had 463 million monthly active
users in April 2023, which makes it one of the biggest online businesses that
use Elixir. In fact, its speedy growth might have had something to do with its
conversion to Elixir in 2014. 

The new programming language helped the company to speed up the performance of
its notification system delivering 14,000 notifications per second and cut down
the number of servers by half—from 30 to just 15—compared to when the service
relied on Java.

Using Elixir also allowed Pinterest to clean up its code, slimming it down to
around 1,000 lines—a tenfold reduction. Pinterest now also uses Elixir to route
more than 30,000 events per second to its in-house rule engine for spam
prevention.

Side note: To accelerate business growth and smooth user experience, Pinterest
bet on PWA.

Read about details: 

13 Best Progressive Web App (PWA) Examples in 2023


2. MOZ: 63 TIMES LESS DISK SPACE, 20 TIMES FASTER API

In 2016, Moz Pro, the leading SEO tool and online platform helping companies
analyze and improve their search engine performance, overhauled of their backend
architecture. Their goals were to:

 * improve speed and performance,
 * help scale the tool,
 * add new features, like selectable date ranges, complete campaign history,
   flexible in-app data segmentation, and customizable data filtering.

They explained the process and the results on their developer blog. The main
problem they had to solve was the fact that the company had outgrown its
database infrastructure. As a result, the architecture didn’t scale well and
stopped performing properly when flooded with large sets of data, which was
absolutely key for a growing SEO analytics tool.

The architecture limited the depth and flexibility of the data to be presented
in various ways. The problems they identified included non-scalability,
non-standard use of MySQL, and concurrency limitations in Ruby.

Switching to Elixir, they were able to use smaller data files and, as a result,
use 63 times less disk space, on average, than when using MySQL rankings tables.
They were also able to improve the speed of their API by 20 times compared to
the previous API, with average response times consistently below 50 ms (compared
to 800+ ms). All in all, the simple deployment resulted in 30 times faster build
speeds.


3. LONELY PLANET: BETTER PERFORMANCE, SCALABLE CONTENT

Lonely Planet is a worldwide travel site (and a traditional travel guide
publisher) serving millions of unique visitors each month. It publishes a lot of
rich content using its website, mobile app, and third-party services. The
problem was that their web content was stuck behind Ruby on Rails applications,
WordPress instances, and various other data stores.

What they needed was to be able to serve it to web and mobile apps quicker and
at scale. This called for a different data model, a cleaner API, and a much more
scalable infrastructure.

After several failed attempts, the company hired a development team that created
several microservices, some of them written in Elixir. One was an Elixir
microserver with an API sub-service using the Phoenix Web framework, designed to
serve available lodgings from booking.com and HostelWorld. Another microservice
written in Elixir serves their inventory of books and ebooks from a custom
eCommerce system backed by a Microsoft SQL server.

According to the architects of the new solution, they were able to put a robust
architecture in place using Elixir, with much higher performance and lower
memory requirements.


4. FINANCIAL TIMES: EASY TO LEARN, QUICK TO SCALE

The Financial Times is a respected news publication established in 1888.
Alongside their traditional daily newspaper, they also run a huge online service
that just announced a million paying readers last April. They previously used
microservice REST APIs, but to deal with the growing online readership and
improve the performance of the service, they turned to a GrapQL API based on
Elixir.

Now, they also have another Elixir-based app and enjoy much smaller memory usage
compared to Java. According to the now former senior software developer at
Financial Times, Ellis Pritchard, Elixir was easy to learn for the development
team—another advantage of the language.


5. TOYOTA CONNECTED: MOBILITY AT A GLOBAL SCALE

Toyota has just launched its first global car-sharing platform. The service uses
Toyota’s proprietary global Mobility Service Platform (MSPF) and a
consumer-facing app.

Toyota Connected uses Elixir as part of the backend system that makes up the
Mobility Service Platform. It provides an API for mobile and web applications
and handles the geo-processing, e.g., verifying whether a vehicle is inside or
outside a geofence.

The company’s plans are to have the majority of its new vehicles sold in North
America and Japan, sending information to their cloud by 2020. They’re planning
to analyze traffic patterns and driver behavior, connect drivers with
infrastructure, and create new services and products.

To learn more about how Toyota Connected uses Elixir, watch the talk their
developer Powell Kinney gave at the Code Elixir LDN conference in 2018, where he
explains designing for longevity using Elixir and Erlang/OTP:




6. BLEACHER REPORT: 8 TIMES MORE TRAFFIC

Bleacher Report, a division of Turner Sports, is the second-largest sports
website in the world. They get up to 1.5 billion page views a month and send out
more than 3 billion push notifications.

Ruby on Rails was originally used to create the service, but the growing traffic
eventually demonstrated that the service was no longer scalable. Another huge
challenge involved supporting concurrent streaming in their Team Stream app.
Given the real-time, mobile-first approach the company boasts, they needed to be
able to handle huge spikes in traffic at peak times on mobile devices.

Their development team tried out various options, including Node.js and Go,
before finally deciding on Elixir—it brought significant improvements in
performance, while its syntax was similar to Ruby’s, which made it easy to
learn.

This is how lead engineer Ben Marx summarized the benefits of the switch back
then:

> Elixir has proven so efficient that testing the limits of our services became
> a challenge unto itself, requiring investment in new benchmarking tools and
> strategies. In a recent test, for example, our most heavily trafficked service
> was able to handle 8x our average traffic load, without autoscaling, before
> the database proved to be a bottleneck.

Other benefits of employing Elixir included:

 * a cleaner code,
 * smaller technical debt,
 * an increase in development speed,
 * impressive performance improvements.


7. DISCORD: 11 MILLION CONCURRENT USERS

Discord is a powerful audio/video communication tool that started out as a chat
platform for gamers because it seamlessly handles audio input on thousands of
voice communication channels at once. Right now, it has gone beyond serving the
gaming community and became a communication and collaboration tool of choice for
many companies and organizations. 

Source: Discord

Discord has an estimated 196.2 million monthly active users in 2023, a 31.5
million or 19.12% growth over the anticipated amount of users in 2022. The
company uses Elixir to build and extend its services, in 2019, Discord used Rust
to solve the problem of immutable data structures in Elixir. They've posted the
solution on GitHub.


8. PEPSICO: ELIXIR-BASED ECOMMERCE BRANCH EARNING 2 BILLION DOLLARS

The company that needs no introduction, PepsiCo, reported using Elixir for their
Ecommerce tool for selling consumer packaged goods.  In 2019, the branch earned
PepsiCo 2 billion dollars.

Jason Fertel, who runs the marketing automation tool at PepsiCo Ecommerce,
shared the reasons for using Elixir in Devchat.tv podcast.



 

He explained that: "Elixir is powerful, straightforward, and easy to learn. It
is efficient and has everything you need out of the box."


WHAT DOES IT MEAN FOR BUSINESS?

In most of the cases mentioned above, the switch to Elixir (or the decision to
build in Elixir right from the start) resulted in apps and services capable of
handling much bigger traffic. That means they scale well and can grow without
losing reliability, all the while improving overall performance. In business
terms, that means more users, customers, and a higher ROI.


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Written by  Matylda Chmielewska


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