"Platform engineering" has been a growing focus over the past few years, though it’s recently become more of a buzzword. But what does it actually mean?
Platform engineering is the practice of establishing internal platforms that provide reusable services and tools. This approach streamlines processes and dismantles traditional silos, encouraging cross-functional collaboration and shared responsibility. One great benefit of this is it reduces developers' cognitive load, allowing them to concentrate on delivering value.
Recognizing the transformative potential of platform engineering, we authored Engineering Elixir Applications: Navigate Each Stage of Software Delivery with
Confidence.
Why Elixir?
Elixir’s maturity and beautifully crafted ecosystem embody the principles of platform engineering. Built on the BEAM, Elixir provides powerful tools for building resilient, concurrent systems while fostering collaboration across teams. Its ecosystem consistently builds bridges—whether through libraries, frameworks, or its emphasis on developer happiness—to overcome silos and streamline workflows.
For example, Phoenix LiveView eliminates the divide between front-end and back-end development by enabling seamless, real-time user interfaces without complex JavaScript frameworks. Livebook empowers teams with interactive notebooks for collaborative data exploration and code execution. NX and Axon bring machine learning capabilities to the Elixir ecosystem, allowing engineers to integrate AI into their applications without switching to other languages. Other tools like Broadway facilitate efficient data processing pipelines, while Ecto simplifies database interactions across different environments.
Hex.pm is another key part of the ecosystem, serving as a unified package manager for both Elixir and Erlang. It provides developers with access to a rich library of dependencies while ensuring compatibility across projects. This integration helps streamline development and fosters a sense of shared tooling between communities, further breaking down silos.
Together, these innovations showcase how Elixir not only reduces complexity but also promotes cohesion, efficiency, and empathy.
Why We Wrote Engineering Elixir Applications?
Our book serves as a comprehensive guide to help you understand the importance of different stages of software delivery by providing practical insights and strategies. It covers foundational concepts such as the significance of CI/CD pipelines, managing infrastructure with IaC, and monitoring and observing applications using an open-source instrumentation stack like Prometheus and Grafana.
The book also delves into the unique capabilities of Elixir and OTP, illustrating how to simplify your tech stack by leveraging the BEAM. By mastering each step of the software delivery process, you can become a more effective team player and advance your career as a multidisciplinary engineer—paving the way to platform engineering.
Our mission is to enhance software delivery processes and foster a culture of confidence and empathy within teams. Through practical experience, we hope that our book will help dismantle silos and eliminate the "throw it over the fence" mentality, ensuring seamless integration and collaboration across teams.
Key Concepts and Practical Implementations
1. Environment Integrity and Consistency
Maintaining consistent configurations across development, testing, and production environments is critical for reliable software delivery. In this journey, we focus on minimizing the risk of configuration drift as much as possible. To achieve this, we use tools like asdf with .tool-versions to ensure that the same language and tool versions are used across all environments, including local development, CI pipelines, and Docker builds. While we chose asdf for its simplicity, the goal is to emphasize the importance of having a single source of truth for versions.
This consistency ensures that environments are predictable and aligned, enabling seamless transitions from development to production.
Example Workflow:
-
Local Development: Developers use
asdfand the.tool-versionsfile to install the exact versions required for the project:
asdf install
This command ensures that local environments match the defined versions in .tool-versions.
-
CI Pipeline: The CI pipeline reads the
.tool-versionsfile to install the correct versions of Elixir and Erlang:
- name: Setup Elixir
uses: erlef/setup-beam@v1.17.3
with:
version-file: .tool-versions
version-type: strict
-
Parsing Versions for Docker: Extract versions from
.tool-versionsto use as build arguments for Docker:
- name: Parse versions from .tool-versions
id: parse-asdf
run: ./scripts/versions.sh
- Docker Build: Pass the parsed versions as build arguments when building the Docker image:
- uses: docker/build-push-action@v5
with:
context: .
...
build-args: |
ELIXIR_VERSION=${{ env.ELIXIR_VERSION }}
OTP_VERSION=${{ env.ERLANG_VERSION }}
Key Benefits:
- Consistency: Ensures that the same versions are used across development, CI, and production.
- Predictability: Reduces the risk of mismatched environments and configuration drift.
- Streamlined Workflows: Simplifies onboarding for developers and eliminates guesswork in CI and Docker builds.
By leveraging tools like asdf and .tool-versions, teams can confidently deliver reliable software while maintaining environment integrity and consistency.
2. Platform Agnosticism
Platform agnosticism allows systems to operate seamlessly across various cloud providers and platforms. One key challenge arises when debugging a specific build version in a local environment. Often, packages are built exclusively for the production platform, without consideration for local debugging needs. This can create difficulties when attempting to debug a package outside the production environment.
Docker's Buildx tool addresses this issue by enabling the creation of multi-architecture images. This ensures applications can run uniformly on platforms such as AMD64 and ARM64, providing the flexibility to debug and test in local or alternative environments.
Example Configuration:
- uses: docker/build-push-action@v5
with:
context: .
platforms: linux/amd64,linux/arm64
...
Dockerfile Example:
Including the ENV ERL_FLAGS="+JPperf true" in the build stage of your phoenix project dockerfile will enable multi-arch builds.
ARG BUILDER_IMG="hexpm/elixir:${EX_VSN}-erlang-${OTP_VSN}-debian-${DEB_VSN}"
ARG RUNNER_IMG="debian:${DEB_VSN}"
FROM ${BUILDER_IMG} AS builder
ENV ERL_FLAGS="+JPperf true"
...
This approach abstracts infrastructure differences, enabling consistent builds and debugging workflows across multiple platforms.
3. Streamlining CI/CD Pipelines
Optimizing CI/CD pipelines ensures faster builds and deployments, directly improving developer productivity and team efficiency. Without proper optimizations, CI/CD pipelines can become a bottleneck, turning into a burden instead of a tool that empowers teams.
Caching Dependencies in Elixir Projects:
- name: Cache deps/build directories
uses: actions/cache@v4
id: cache-deps
env:
EX_VSN: ${{ steps.setup-beam.outputs.elixir-version }}
ERL_VSN: ${{ steps.setup-beam.outputs.otp-version }}
with:
path: |
deps
_build
key: mix-${{ env.EX_VSN }}-${{ env.ERL_VSN }}-${{ hashFiles('**/mix.lock') }}
restore-keys: |
mix-${{ env.EX_VSN }}-${{ env.ERL_VSN }}-
mix-${{ env.EX_VSN }}-
mix-
Optimizing Docker Build Cache:
- uses: docker/build-push-action@v5
with:
...
cache-from: type=registry,ref=ghcr.io/beamops/kanban:cache
cache-to: type=registry,ref=ghcr.io/beamops/kanban:cache,mode=max
push: true
...
4. Scaling and Monitoring Applications
Effectively scaling applications is a critical component of building resilient systems. In Engineering Elixir Applications, we delve into strategies for deploying distributed BEAM systems across AWS EC2 nodes, leveraging load balancers to distribute traffic, and orchestrating containers with Docker.
Equally important is the ability to monitor your applications effectively. The book provides detailed insights into collecting key application metrics, such as system health, request rates, and resource utilization. Using tools like Prometheus for metric collection and Grafana for visualization, you can establish proactive alerting mechanisms to detect and respond to potential issues before they impact users.
5. Leveraging OTP to Simplify Your Stack
One of the standout advantages of the BEAM ecosystem is its built-in support for distributed computing and real-time communication, powered by OTP. In Engineering Elixir Applications, we demonstrate how deploying an application using distributed Erlang can significantly simplify your tech stack while enabling powerful features such as real-time updates.
With OTP, you can build applications that are inherently distributed and fault-tolerant. The BEAM's ability to seamlessly handle message passing between nodes in a distributed system eliminates the need for additional technologies often required in other stacks. For example, in a typical non-BEAM environment, achieving real-time updates might require integrating separate technologies like Message Queues (e.g., RabbitMQ or Kafka) for communication between services.
In contrast, the BEAM allows you to achieve these capabilities natively by simply configuring your application to run in a distributed setup. This reduces
complexity and overhead, as the BEAM’s built-in distribution handles:
- Node Communication: Using lightweight message passing across distributed nodes without external dependencies.
- Fault Tolerance: OTP supervisors monitor processes and automatically restart them in case of failure, maintaining system stability.
- Real-Time Updates: By leveraging distributed processes and the PubSub model, you can deliver real-time updates effortlessly.
Example: Real-Time Updates with Distributed Erlang
In the book, we deploy a distributed application that uses Erlang nodes to communicate and synchronize real-time updates. By doing so, we avoid introducing external systems, allowing the BEAM to handle real-time data flow inherently.
Key Benefits of Using OTP in a Distributed Setup:
- Simplicity: Replace multiple external tools with the BEAM's built-in capabilities.
- Reduced Operational Overhead: Fewer moving parts mean easier maintenance and deployment.
- Performance: The BEAM's lightweight processes and efficient message passing ensure low latency in real-time systems.
- Scalability: Distributed Erlang makes horizontal scaling straightforward, enabling your system to grow with demand.
By leveraging OTP and distributed Erlang, your team can build systems that are both simpler and more powerful. This approach not only streamlines your stack but also reduces the cognitive load on your developers, enabling them to focus on delivering value rather than managing complex integrations.
Empowering Teams Through Platform Engineering
Platform engineering not only enhances technical workflows but also fosters a culture of collaboration, confidence, and empathy. For those interested in learning more about these concepts and practical implementations, Engineering Elixir Applications provides a step-by-step guide to take your application from development to production, ensuring teams can navigate each stage of software delivery with confidence.
By adhering to the principles and integrating the practices shared in our book, you will be able to overcome the challenges of software delivery.
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