Elixir on Google Cloud Platform and App Engine

https://cloud.google.com/elixir/

by shalabhc • 9 years ago

510 130 9 years ago

cloud.google.com

Exuma• 9 years ago

Wow this is cool. Does it take advantage of Erlang's distributed networking/nodes feature?

dazuma3• 9 years ago

We're not doing anything special to help set up distributed Erlang at the moment. It would probably be difficult with App Engine because it's designed to manage stateless containers. But I could imagine setting up such a network with Kubernetes Engine, or definitely with Compute Engine VMs.

sb82444• 9 years ago

At elixir ATL meetup we setup an elixir app on GKE and connected the nodes via peerage in under 2 hours. Definitely possible!

chingor13• 9 years ago

It currently doesn't do automated clustering of nodes out of the box. It should be possible to build a clustering strategy for libcluster (https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster) for App Engine. Note that there's already a kubernetes strategy which could run on the Google Kubernetes Engine.

etxm• 9 years ago

I’ve used peerage (https://github.com/mrluc/peerage) on kubernetes for SD. It’s simple to set up and works in dev/test using its local adapters.

Libcluster looks good too. Everything bitwalker touches seems to be solid AF.

jesses3• 9 years ago

I can't speak to GCP much, but gigalixir.com is a platform-as-a-service that takes advantage of Erlang's distributed network/nodes. I'm the founder.

dazuma3• 9 years ago

Hey all! I'm one of the engineers who worked on this. If anyone has questions or wants to get involved, feel free to open an issue on the github repos.

* Elixir clients for Google APIs: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/elixir-google-api

* Elixir runtime for App Engine: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/elixir-runtime

* Elixir examples: https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/elixir-samples

brightball12• 9 years ago

Just want to say thank you and this is great news!

On a related note, there goes my weekend.

willyk3• 9 years ago

Agreed, also just want to say thanks, this is awesome news. Much appreciated!

burntcaramel2• 9 years ago

A question: what are the pluses/minuses of deploying to App Engine vs Compute Engine. Specifically, what are the tradeoffs of Elixir on App Engine? Thanks in advance.

dazuma3• 9 years ago

That's a good question. It comes down to how much you want to control the devops vs how much you want someone else to handle it for you.

App Engine is a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) which generally means a lot of things are done for you. You give App Engine the code, and App Engine builds it, deploys it, scales it, monitors it, applies OS patches, and generally provides a bunch of related services for you.

Compute Engine is more infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) which means the service gives you VMs, and you handle installation, build, deployment, and setting up load balancing, scaling, monitoring, etc. the way you want.

There are also hybrid products that fall somewhere in the middle. Kubernetes Engine is an example. Indeed, you can locate most hosting platforms somewhere on this spectrum.

Note also that there are trade-offs specific to Elixir as well. PaaSes generally have to be opinionated about application architecture. Most PaaSes assume a stateless web application well suited for container-based deployment, which runs somewhat counter to Erlang's stateful services and hot code swapping. If you're writing a typical web app (say, using Phoenix) then a PaaS like App Engine will often work very well. But if you are doing something different and managing persistent nodes and processes, you may need to control deployment yourself, which makes a lower level service like Compute Engine more useful.

matlin• 9 years ago

Thank you for your work! Is this an indicator that Google is interested in or using Elixir internally or is it just a response to growing requests from the community?

DannyBee6• 9 years ago

The latter. But you should realize Google is pretty conservative internally in the main repository because of the amount of code/tooling/etc. While we let people experiment in the main repository, they are controlled experiments. Even if we decided, tomorrow, to move the main repositories away from our current set of programming languages, that would be a fairly long term path, not a short one.

Outside of the main repository, or on google open source projects, or etc, people can generally do what they want, they just don't get the benefits of the above if they aren't using a language we already support very well.

igravious• 9 years ago

I think it's pretty well known that the approved internal Google languages are Java, C++, Go, Python. Could someone correct me if I'm wrong?

skrebbel2• 9 years ago

I have a hard time finding information about the limits of App Engine. Eg Heroku has all kinds of stuff going on like connection limits and daily restarts and whatnot. How is that with App Engine for Elixir? Is this documented anywhere?

Also, why use App Engine over Compute Engine for Elixir? I understand "if you want more control" but can you elaborate about what kind of "more control" someone would want that App Engine doesn't offer?

iamalchemist• 9 years ago

Phoenix uses Postgres by default and Postgres has been the go-to-database for many. When will Postgres on CloudSQL be available to all?

Cidan• 9 years ago

It already is! It's available in open beta for all customers, with a GA release coming in the near future.

Disclaimer: I work for Google Cloud

thibaut_barrere• 9 years ago

One question (but first congrats on releasing this!) - is there a way to achieve hot-reloading currently?

This would help handle an important use case for me: ability to keep thousands of (client) websocket connections alive across deployments, to avoid missing a data update.

Thanks!

bpicolo3• 9 years ago

That’s a really interesting addition to app engine. Great idea too - try to be first to an up and coming platform rather than try to move applications that have deployed in one way for a decade.

mijoharas2• 9 years ago

Could someone explain what would make the Google cloud platform a better deploy target for my elixir application than any other?

djsumdog• 9 years ago

I'm curious about this as well. I hate vendor lock-in, so I'm for anything that's a minimal deployment that doesn't tie you to one provider.

freedomben• 9 years ago

I hate the idea of vendor lock-in, but years now of reaping the benefits has convinced me that it's just better to accept the lock-in and take advantage of your chosen platform's features. Remaining platform agnostic is difficult, complicates your code, and forces you to miss out on great services. these days I pick a provider and stick with them. It used to be AWS, but Google has been getting really good. I've been using Google cloud a lot.

brightball12• 9 years ago

You’ll need to evaluate GCP’s peripheral offerings for database, APIs, pricing, etc.

The biggest thing that this does is give you first class access to the ecosystem APIs and with native setups for AppEngine (Heroku-ish), Compute Engine (do it yourself on a VM) and a provider in Gigalixir which runs on GCP that gives a Heroku-like experience but is tailored specifically to everything Elixir needs (hot loading, clustering out of the box, etc).

Between those two things, GCP is pretty strong.

mijoharas2• 9 years ago

Thanks for the nice answer!

I was reading up on Gigalixir thanks to this thread, is it basically a more "batteries included" version of AppEngine specifically targetted for Elixir?

themihai• 9 years ago

Stay away from GAE! Anything you invest in(i.e. tools, code on proprietary APIs such datastore) can become worthless due the vendor lock-in.

pselbert2• 9 years ago

Surprising development. I wonder if this will complement Gigalixir or compete with it.

The ability to connect between nodes, avoid mandatory restart, avoid connection limits and keep websocket connections alive easily gives compute engine a significant advantage over platforms like Heroku.

brightball12• 9 years ago

Will be interesting to watch. Between Gigalixir and now this, it’s starting to look like GCP is positioning itself as the place to go for Elixir apps.

holografix• 9 years ago

Disclaimer: I just got a job with Heroku

As far as I understand Heroku lets you connect between nodes (Dynos within a private space with dns discovery [0]) and also supports websockets [1]... for the mandatory restart, wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway?

[0] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/dyno-dns-service-disco... [1] https://devcenter.heroku.com/articles/websockets

Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

enraged_camel• 9 years ago

More info here: https://hexdocs.pm/phoenix/heroku.html

Maybe you can convince the powers that be to do something about these. :)

bostonvaulter22• 9 years ago

The problem with private spaces is the pricing is out of reach of the vast majority of early-mid-stage startups since it is only available under the enterprise model.

brightball12• 9 years ago

If I recall correctly, just turning on private spaces is not within most people’s price range.

With most things you’d want stateless. Erlang/Elixir is designed with 3 built in databases, the ability to hold states on isolated processes and per process supervision and recovery. It’s a different animal than most.

pselbert2• 9 years ago

Typically I design applications to be as stateless and tolerant of restarts as possible, as they do get restarted during deploys anyhow. That is a minor issue compared to the difficulties around connection restarts and communication between nodes.

It is wonderful that Heroku now offers exec, which at least allows using observer and other remote debugging tools. The tooling keeps getting better—but there is no denying that it was designed for Ruby deployment, and working the BEAM has significant production differences.

59nadir• 9 years ago

wouldn't you want to design your process as stateless anyway? Sorry if I'm missing something obvious!

That's exactly it. The value proposition for Erlang & Elixir is essentially that they provide great abstractions for managing state and they make great back-end languages for creating stateful applications.

jesses3• 9 years ago

I'm the founder of gigalixir.com, and I haven't dug into this very deeply yet, but I'll just say that from my perspective, this is great regardless of if it competes or complements gigalixir.com. Anything that helps grow the Elixir community and helps drive adoption of Elixir will benefit everyone in this space.

_m8fo2• 9 years ago

Excellent!

I recall someone on here (HN) saying that many of Elixir's strengths are weakened significantly because K8 does similar things (auto distribution, hot reloading, etc.)

Any truth to this? Also, can you distribute nodes on VMs and deploy them to Google Cloud?

---

As a side note, is there a front-end equivalent to Elixir? Elm is functional but is non intuitive. Elixirscript is a thing but seems a bit too early.

willyk3• 9 years ago

The two options you mention are the ones I see used most often (with React & Vue being 3rd/4th), but I wouldn't say any of those are "frontend equivalents".

jrs95• 9 years ago

That’s just crazy to me. The amount of effort you have to put in to achieve this with Kubernetes is way beyond what you would have to do to write you application in Elixir. If you already have multiple services in another language, it may be worth the effort, but the BEAM gives you nearly for free what is relatively expensive to get elsewhere.

hosh• 9 years ago

Elixir is great for stateless apps. So are a bunch of other platforms.

Elixir is exceptional at stateful apps. And it is true, many of those things are now handled through K8S. However, K8S doesn't handle everything and requires a lot more ceremony and infrastructure than what you can get within the Elixir/Erlang ecosystem.

I think there might be a way to work with Elixir + K8S in a way specific to the domain you are working with. Not everyone needs to be able to hot-reload code without dropping live connections, but if if you do, and you want to deploy on K8S, then you can try writing a K8S operator that encapsulates that idea. However: https://gravitational.com/blog/running-postgresql-on-kuberne... (which is more about how every distributed system requires deep domain knowledge, not just specifically about PostgreSQL)

I have not deployed Elixir on GCP. I have deployed other things though, and I can tell you the private networking is much better set up than AWS. As far as distributing nodes, you can do that with any of the cloud providers.

willyk3• 9 years ago

If you looking into OTP, you'll see there's quite a but more and to some extent it does things differently than K8 (e.g., Observer, fault tolerance, concurrency and vertical/horizontal scaling w/message passing, etc.). See: https://www.manning.com/books/the-little-elixir-and-otp-guid...

eat_veggies• 9 years ago

Have you tried Reason[0] and Reason-React[1]?

[0] https://reasonml.github.io/

[1] https://github.com/reasonml/reason-react

_m8fo2• 9 years ago

This looks very interesting. Thanks for the suggestion.

dominotw• 9 years ago

As a side note, is there a front-end equivalent to Elixir? Elm is functional but is non intuitive. Elixirscript is a thing but seems a bit too early.

Purescript?

thinkpad20• 9 years ago

Aside from both being functional languages, they have relatively little in common. Purescript has Haskell-style purity (with synchronous impurity via monads) and doesn’t have an inherent concept of processes or message passing like Elixir/Erlang do. Purescript is statically typed with no (I think?) macro system, and elixir is dynamic and makes extensive use of macros. Etc.

AngeloAnolin• 9 years ago

I've looked at learning Elixir paired with a front end tool and a lot of Elixir experts are pointing to the Phoenix Framework. [1]

[1] http://phoenixframework.org/

bpicolo3• 9 years ago

Phoenix is a backend framework.

hanrelan2• 9 years ago

I've used Elixir/Phoenix on K8s and there's some truth to this. For example - kubernetes' "if the process dies, kill the whole container and restart it" model doesn't work very well with Elixir (a process within the VM can die and K8s will have no idea). To some degree, K8s is replicating some of the BEAM functionality.

But there's still a lot from Kubernetes that Elixir can take advantage of. For example - service discovery, autoscaling, clustering, secret management - all made easier with a K8s deployment and Elixir.

I wrote a few blog posts about it a while ago if you're interested: https://medium.com/polyscribe/a-complete-guide-to-deploying-...

sb82444• 9 years ago

Hmm I'm not quite sure I follow the process examine. If your started process crashes (let's say supervisor fails to start due to too many failures), k8s would restart the process (your app) to try again. If a managed process in elixir dies, you could make that bring down your whole app, but generally you would want to handle it yourself.

This is similar to an app server in Ruby. A single worker might die, but it's still being managed by a central coordinator. If the coordinator dies, everything is down and the app restarts

josevalim• 9 years ago

Unless Kubernetes is killing the container without respecting the shutdown time of the underlying processes, this should not be problem.

Once Kubernetes sends an exit signal to the VM, the VM will start the shutdown of its processes, and everything should terminate gracefully.

It is OK that Kubernetes doesn't know about Elixir processes terminating, because it is not its job. It is the job of the Elixir software to express its start-up and shutdown guarantees. If you don't want the VM to start when you don't have a database connection, then you should start a process right after your connection pool starts and before your endpoint runs that attempts to issue a query and act accordingly.

rkangel• 9 years ago

That's a very helpful post series, but your links to the follow on articles are broken, and there is a 'TODO' in the middle of part 1.

fulafel• 9 years ago

ClojureScript is good for the front-end language. Though don't dismiss Elm easily either, it's so cool.

qaq• 9 years ago

Nice Elixir is becoming more mainstream

sergiotapia• 9 years ago

Really excited to see Elixir going more mainstream. It's a hidden gem that solves so many painpoints of the day to day programming. It's POWERFUL!

nstj• 9 years ago

Hidden gem

richjdsmith• 9 years ago

Likewise. I havn't come across a case of someone getting to know the language and disliking it. It's truly a great tool.

beckler• 9 years ago

Okay.

I spent a lot of time last week trying to get elixir setup on gcloud, but variables were the one thing I could never figure out and I eventually gave up.

Is there some magical way to get variables and secrets in gcloud without having to commit them to a repo?

derefr2• 9 years ago

Deploy to Google Kubernetes Engine; `kubectl create secret`; set the env-vars of your Deployment to be derived from the secret.

skrebbel2• 9 years ago

Wait, you can't put secrets in GCP without first learning Kubernetes? That's pretty messed up :/

skybrian• 9 years ago

This seems to be using App Engine's "flexible" environment. It's less appealing to me than "real" App Engine since as far as I know there's no free tier.

ofek• 9 years ago

Discord (a heavy Erlang/Elixir user) runs on GCP, right?

theDoug• 9 years ago

Yep. As of 24 days ago, there’s this public quote[1]

"We are on GCP now and have no plans to migrate off of it, or go 'multi-cloud'"

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/discordapp/comments/7mv84u/does_dis...

(Disclosure: I work on Google Cloud)

jhgg• 9 years ago

Yes we do! We’ve been able to shake out a fair amount of platform bugs that the Beam VM had on GCP too! Thanks to the google team for taking them all seriously and fixing them. Some were particularly nasty :)

brightball12• 9 years ago

Thanks for doing the hard work so we don’t have too. :)

jshen• 9 years ago

This is really cool and all, but I really wish Google Cloud would move things out of beta faster. Cloud Functions are still in beta despite them being GA at both AWS and Azure for a while now. Enterprises typically won't use beta software which makes it nearly impossible to pick Google Cloud for an enterprise.

But hey, they have Elixir support !?!?

theshank• 9 years ago

This is super exciting!

ninjakeyboard2• 9 years ago

I wrote a book on Akka with many years of experience with it and I have been using Elixir professionally for 7 months or so on greenfield/replatforming efforts and I have to say that the BEAM VM is really an incredible piece of technology that leaves Akka on the JVM in the dust in several aspects because the VM is actor-model native. I wish there was a statically typed language that ran on BEAM but Elixir and Erlang are great technologies to run in production if you can accept some of the associated risk of newer eco-systems in Elixir (but erlang has your back!).

ihumanable• 9 years ago

You may already know about it, but if you are looking for a statically typed language that runs on BEAM, you might want to check out Elchemy.

https://github.com/wende/elchemy

It allows you to write elm-like code that transpiles into easy to read and idiomatic (for the most part) elixir code.

smt883• 9 years ago

THANK YOU. I didn't know about this, myself.

I love the philosophy and robustness of the BEAM VM, but I can't go back to the stone ages of a language with a poor (or non-existent) static type system.

arianvanp• 9 years ago

Purescript also has an Erlang backend !

jameshh2• 8 years ago

I'm also making a backend for Idris: https://github.com/jameshaydon/idris-elixir

Zalastax2• 9 years ago

The problem of static types for the communicating parts of the actor model is not really solved yet. In the meantime there's Alpaca-lang and Simon Fowler did a run-time monitor for Erlang with behavioral types from Scribble. I think we'll see some nice progress in this area in a few years.

tormeh2• 9 years ago

Akka has solved them already. Just pattern match on the object you receive.

jameshh2• 8 years ago

I think if you have an evolved enough type system, then there isn't such a problem. I have written an Elixir backend for Idris and given some examples of well-typed actor communication here:

https://github.com/jameshaydon/idris-elixir

mikhailfranco• 8 years ago

By coincidence The Morning Paper has this today:

A static verification framework for message passing in Go using behavioural types, Lange et al., ICSE 18

http://blog.acolyer.org/2018/01/25/a-static-verification-fra...

brightball12• 9 years ago

Have you turned on Dialyzer?

keithnoizu3• 8 years ago

I'll have to look this over, I'm running a server cluster on GCE + Appengine currently aggregating and triggering alerts against about 300k device readings per minute. Huge pain point keeping things synchronized between GCE on java and the elixir backend.

Elixir on Google Cloud Platform and App Engine

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