The Business

Value of Elixir
WHY ELIXIR IS THE COST-SAVING, FUTURE-
PROOFING, GROWTH-BOOSTING TOOL FOR
YOUR MODERN BUSINESS.
Table of Contents
Introduction 3

Reliability 4

Scalability 5

Infrastructure Costs 6

Developer Productivity 7

Hiring & Talent 8

Evaluating Elixir for Your Next Project 9

Introduction
Since José Valim created it in 2012, the Elixir programming language has been solving
problems. At first, it solved the challenges Valim experienced during his time as a Ruby
programmer and addressed the need for a language built to handle multicore processors
as they became the norm.

Over time, however, those same benefits have Elixir is built on that foundation. With that comes
expanded to cover a wide swath of use cases. the same stability, concurrency, and scalability
While Valim originally built Elixir to leverage BEAM— benefits that Erlang was built for, with a
the virtual machine behind Erlang—to handle programming language that’s easy for developers
the needs of multicore machines, that decision to write and flexible to meet the needs of any
now means that Elixir comes with out-of-the-box number of businesses.
capabilities that make it uniquely suited to modern
As digital products play an ever-growing role in the
digital products.
day-to-day lives of people around the world, more
Because Erlang was built to seamlessly handle the and more companies will need to deliver products
demands of telephony systems, it is purpose- that are reliable, work for huge numbers of people at
built to handle massive amounts of traffic with as once, and can grow quickly without missing a beat.
little downtime as possible. Since then, Erlang has
In short, more companies need Elixir.
become a backbone of the modern internet for
its reliability and ability to handle huge amounts of
traffic—Cisco estimates that 90% of worldwide
internet traffic passes through Erlang-controlled
network switches.

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Reliability
Goods and services, public support, and our work lives are
becoming increasingly digital. This means that application reliability
is important and will only become more important each year.

When an app fails in production the impact on an organization

can be significant:

→ Downtime can cost as much as $9,000 a minute

→ 32% of respondents in one study said they would abandon an
app for a competitor if they experienced poor performance
→ In the same survey, 20% of respondents said they would not
trust a company if its app was reported in the media as having
poor performance
→ 88% of Americans said they had negative feelings about a
brand if it produced a poorly performing website or app

And the stakes are even higher for some industries: 63% of end
users expect their banking and financial services app to work
flawlessly. That means, if your organization is providing a digital
financial tool to your users, the margin for error is even narrower
than in other sectors, and your brand is on the line every time a
user opens your app.

The poor performance of a product or service can not only leave

a long-lasting negative impression of your brand, but it also
incites users to turn to competitors instead.

This is where Elixir’s foundation in Erlang can be a major asset

to modern startups and enterprise companies alike. Simply put,
Elixir is inherently reliable and results in minimal downtime for
your app.

Elixir is built so that, even if one part of an

application crashes, the system as a whole 63% OF END USERS
can continue running. EXPECT THEIR BANKING AND
FINANCIAL SERVICES APP TO
This results in more uptime for the application, but also has
WORK FLAWLESSLY.
the important side effect of requiring few lines of code and
significantly less development time.

It allows companies to more easily build reliable systems.

Something that would require architect-level acumen and a
great deal more code and developer time to deliver in other
languages is achieved by default with Elixir.

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Scalability
Elixir’s out-of-the-box capabilities make it well-suited for early-stage startups preparing for long-term growth.

The ability to build an app that will support the first 1,000 users as easily
as the next 1,000,000 has significant implications for startups and market
leaders alike.

Take Veeps, a livestreaming concert platform, for real-time interactions and support by 10 to 100
example. Originally designed as a platform for artists times. With Elixir, Veeps could easily host the traffic
to sell VIP tour packages, Veeps began offering needed to accommodate any artist, no matter
livestreaming events when COVID-19 brought how large their fanbase (and, in turn, how large the
in-person concerts to a halt. But its Ruby on Rails number of concurrent users watching a livestream).
MVP couldn’t handle the traffic, and the platform
Elixir’s ability to offer scalability of this magnitude
couldn’t keep up with user demands. Add to that a
not only benefits applications that experience huge
sharp increase in the complexity of Veeps’ flagship
surges in traffic but also applications that don’t
product, and it was clear that without a dramatic
have millions of users but have features that could
technical shift, Veeps risked losing its newfound user
measure millions of data points. It opens the door to
base and the revenue that came with it.
features and functionality that would have previously
To meet that need, Veeps chose to move its app been impossible or impractical to implement.
entirely to Elixir. The change allowed it to expand

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Infrastructure Costs
In some cases, throwing additional hardware at the problem fills a temporary need for scalability, but with
continued user growth and adoption, that leads to ever-increasing application costs.

Developing applications in more performant languages—like Elixir—however, enables your organization to

break this spiraling infrastructure cost dilemma.

With more than 200 million active users, Pinterest, an early Elixir adopter, used the language to rewrite its
back-end Java code responsible for managing its rate limit service for both the Pinterest API and Ads API.

The new system’s 50% response time is around 500 microseconds with a 90% response time of 800
microseconds. The Elixir system is not just faster and more consistent, but also able to run on half the number
of servers the older Java system required. The result is a $2 million savings for Pinterest on server costs.

An even more profound example of speed and performance comes from Bleacher Report, the sports
culture news organization with over 20 million unique monthly users.

Migrating from Rails to Elixir dropped its number of necessary servers

from 150 to just eight, and allowed them to reduce the number of people
on their development team.

The migration also led to a significant performance boost and allowed Bleacher Report to send out more
than 200 million push notifications a day between one and seven minutes faster than its competitors. In
an industry as competitive and reliant on real-time alerts as sports entertainment, that time difference is a
significant differentiator for Bleacher Report.

WITH ELIXIR, BLEACHER REPORT DROPPED

ITS NUMBER OF NECESSARY SERVERS FROM

150 TO JUST 8

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 Compare Elixir to a hypothetical Rails app, for
example. A Rails app might depend on several
distinct pieces. You can only handle one web
request at a time and can’t spin up new processes
on demand, so the solution is to use tools that
spawn multiple application servers upfront and put
a web server in front to hand off requests.

You can’t take care of slow background tasks

without blocking your web requests, though, so you
use Redis and Resque to handle the background
tasks. You also can’t keep a large Ruby process
running all the time to do scheduled tasks, so you
add a dependency cron. And since there’s no built-
in Ruby tool for managing multiple parts of a running
system, you turn to yet more tools to start and
monitor them.

Our hypothetical Elixir app needs none of that.

Your team gets the functionality they need for
a stable app out of the box. That means fewer
things to manage—like all the stopgap tools in our
hypothetical Ruby app—and fewer things that can
break and rack up technical debt.
Developer Productivity
One of the less obvious—but remarkably
Due to Elixir’s syntax, it is easy to
impactful—benefits of Elixir is the new levels of write clean and understandable
efficiency it introduces for developers. code without sacrificing developer
Studies have shown that developers spend productivity.
anywhere from 23% to 33% of their time addressing
technical debt, and a 2020 report estimated that As organizations are challenged to do more with
technical debt cost U.S. companies about less, Elixir offers a significant opportunity to address
$1.3 trillion. a never-ending product backlog. Bottom line:
Elixir helps mitigate that cost for your business. With If your development team is spending valuable
efficient, clear code that avoids the complications time fixing technical defects or optimizing for
that lead to technical debt in other languages, your performance, that also means they’re spending less
team will spend less time addressing technical debt time on developing new features or innovating.
and more time working on revenue-generating
projects. Oftentimes companies gravitate toward
their historic competencies without measuring the
economic impact of alternative solutions.

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“
Hiring & Talent
One of the common challenges startup founders and technical
leaders cite as a reason not to use Elixir is the comparatively
small pool of developer talent and difficulty hiring. However,
that’s not the roadblock some may think it is.

On one hand, recent initiatives—like the DockYard Academy—

are actively expanding the number of developers in Elixir. The
“We’re here to tell Elixir community is growing and attracting new talent every day.
you that it scales to Aside from those opportunities, developers with experience
the real world. You in another language often find it easy to pick up Elixir as well.
can take a team or a That means—even if your development team is composed of
engineers with no current Elixir experience—training them on
company who doesn’t Elixir can be an easy, productive process.
know anything about Cars.com is an ideal example of this process. After deciding
Elixir and get them to migrate to Elixir for an entirely new back-end enterprise
architecture, Cars.com used mob coding sessions where an
productive in a few
Elixir engineer wrote code live with the Cars.com development
short months.” team watching to teach them everything they needed to know
to maintain and grow the new Cars.com app.
— DANIEL MACKEY,
CARS.COM ENGINEERING The result was that Cars.com got all
MANAGER (2019)
the business benefits of an Elixir app,
without having to hire a new team of Elixir
developers to maintain or grow it. And the
same process can work seamlessly for
myriad other businesses.

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Evaluating Elixir for Your Next Project

Elixir can drive organizational value based on its performance, stability,

and scalability paired with clean syntax and code clarity. And the fact that
the capabilities of Elixir are quickly expanding to include everything from
machine learning to native app development and even an Elixir-based
CMS, and it’s clear that investing in Elixir is the long-term solution that
sets your organization up for success now.

As you analyze your next set of application requirements, Elixir should be front-and-center for any
greenfield project, but especially for use cases involving any or multiple combinations of the following:

→ High availability requirements → Systems expecting high traffic → Real-time updates

with little to no downtime → Web applications requiring fast (e.g. stock ticker)
→ High scaling needs with & consistent response times → Bidirectional real-time
minimal budgets → Distributed systems with communication with
→ A need to quickly develop a demanding concurrency WebSockets (e.g. chat, games)
production-ready MVP requirements (e.g. blockchain)

Other languages can address one or more of the needs above, but there are always trade-offs. Elixir strikes
the right balance to leave you with a more reliable, growth-ready application that will meet your users’ needs
for years to come.

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 DockYard’s
Commitment to R&D

$7.3M in R&D
About DockYard INVESTED OVER THE PAST
SEVEN YEARS TO ADVANCE
DockYard is a digital product consultancy. We specialize in THE WEB FOR ALL
production-ready apps that scale as companies grow.

For over a decade, companies like Apple and Netflix have

trusted us to overcome complex product challenges. We help
to upskill teams through a range of consulting services with +2,000 hours
capabilities in product design, full-stack engineering, project DEVOTED TO PROGRESSING
management, QA, strategy, training, and user experience (UX). OPEN-SOURCE PROJECTS
ANNUALLY
We’re also dedicated to advancing open-source web
development technologies, such as libraries and tooling built
around the Elixir programming language. From idea to impact,
DockYard empowers forward-thinking teams to build for the
future. Ready to put our expertise to work for you? Contact Countless
us at [email protected]. Innovators
USING “DOCKYARD DAYS”
TO GROW AND CONTRIBUTE
TO DIGITAL PRODUCT
COMMUNITIES

©2023 | 10