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(Thanks you to Lukas and all others who work on this)
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
Of other note is that Erlang seems to enable folks that use it to punch above their weight class when it comes to running services internally and such.
Serverless is far from the only valid way to run things these days.
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
It's complete blindness to the reality. Trusting one single provider for your whole service (often not even completely opensource) is the same trap as Windows or Oracle in the 90's...just worse (because not on prem)...but hey history repeats itself ;)
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
People also overestimate what “the new” is, constantly. Otherwise, PHP would be dead by now rather than flourishing.
Serverless is essentially PHP in CGI mode, with a lot of marketing behind it. There are certainly places where it’s beneficial.
Servers and databases are not going away anytime soon. They are simply too effective for what they do.
The “everything is legacy crowd” hasn’t been correct about almost anything in my lifetime. Mainframes are still going strong. SQL databases are better than ever and the NoSQL crowd has largely died out.
90% of the cloud ecosystems of today are just doing what Java app servers were doing in the late 90s.
Erlang and the BEAM offer a set of trade offs that happen to be ideal for a lot of server based use cases to make hard things really simple. Probably not going to take over the world but if it fits what you do you probably won’t want to go back.
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
Some great innovating Elixir projects:
Oban: https://getoban.pro/
Oban Demo: https://getoban.pro/oban
Livebook: https://livebook.dev/
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
Many of Elixir’s strengths are Erlang’s strengths.
I wouldn’t hesitate to learn some Elixir if it’s interesting to you. It’s not as pervasive as other languages but it’s not niche either.
Full disclosure, it’s been such a wild success for my team at New Relic the last 5 years that I’m very biased :)
I've seen more than once recently an engineer saying that software solutions outside of the Serverless ecosystem (FaaS, DB, etc) is "the new legacy". And that cloud providers have solved all the pains that Erlang was supposed to address. What's your feeling on this? Elixir sounds very compelling to me, but I worry that I might be going in a direction that's not where the industry is going.
That anybody claiming serverless has "solved all the pain" is definitely trying to sell me something.