Releases with Elixir >= 1.9 are now quite good. Run mix release.init, write some configuration, then just mix release and you get a tarball ready to deploy.

We use a multistage Dockerfile to build the release and run it on a barebone alpine image, and it's never given me a single issue since I set this system up almost 2 years ago when Distillery was still the release library of choice.

And it's never crashed once, but that's the magic of OTP :-)