I wanted to solicit the educated opinions of the forum-folk when it comes to the deployment of Elixir apps. Is using Docker in the deployment (and/or in the development) of Elixir apps idiomatic? When so many deployments for different technologies rely on containers of some sort, some SysAdmins/DevOps people push for a Dockerize-able application as the de facto standard for any deployment scenario. Most DevOps people I’ve interacted with are very much coming from the “Cattle” side in the “Pets vs. Cattle” analogy where containers are thought of as disposable entities. However, with Elixir, I haven’t had as much use for Docker as I have when working with other languages, and I am wondering if this is a fluke or indicative of the inherent nature of Elixir/Erlang? I have rarely had to snuff out a running Elixir app – the adage of “write once, run forever” really has held true from my experience, but this doesn’t seem to be something DevOps people expect or even want.
The pros for deploying with Docker is that it represents a “package format” that is more standard – the DevOps guys wouldn’t need to think much about what’s inside an image.
The cons would be the hits to performance. Elixir/Erlang is already running inside a VM, so it seems redundant and a hit to performance to containerize a container. (I know has been especially true for development).
What are others seeing out there? Are Dockerized Elixir deployments common and/or appropriate? And why, or why not?
Thanks for your thoughts.
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