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Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

We love you all so much.

Honestly the more I read these posts, the more I want to use the product. :) (Full-time elixir dev running a SaaS and 8+ projects on elixir, including covid vaccine scheduling system that handles thousands of users with no issues. LOVE elixir.)

WE LOVE ELIXIR.

I don't even write Elixir and I love it, because we built a system that makes it super easy to take a Dockerfile of some random thing, and deploy 20 instances of it spread evenly around some bunch of regions that can talk privately to each other by default.

That's a fun thing to be able to do in any language, but to exploit it in a Go program, I'd have to actually think, pull something like Serf in, whatever.

But Phoenix LiveView apps literally ship with a dashboard where you can see all your instances running, and then first-class features for them to chat between themselves.

LiveView is cool all on its own, but Elixir+Phoenix+LiveView is such a sweet application of a hosting environment like ours. Expect us to be weirdly chatty about Elixir in the coming months.

I'm looking forward to this. Is it going to be possible to run local Postgres (or one of the distributed dbs that are PG compatable) read instances alongside the Elixir instances?

Yes. Our beta postgres service lets you add read only replicas in any region you want.

"Deploy any full stack app globally" has been a big goal for us over the last year. We're getting close.

I can't find anything about postgres pricing. Also, the section on extensions in your doc is blank. Since postgres is just a fly app, would it make sense for a user to just fork it and add extensions they needed? That would be awesome if feasible.

Cool, and that means the local instance of Elixir (for example) would connect directly to that read replica? If so, that's amazing.

Also, is this possible with Hasura (local colocated read)?

Yep! Our internal service discovery lets you connect to instances in the same region. If you're running in "SJC" you could use "sjc.my-postgres-cluster.internal", for example.

Looking forward to it.

You might get a kick out of this: https://liveview-counter.fly.dev/

It's a multi region Phoenix app using libcluster to power LiveView. We have some fun ideas for Elixir, we just need to speed up builds.

The general deployment story with elixir leaves a lot to be desired. I hope this is one of the things that you guys are planning to be chatty about! We currently use edeliver and it just feels clunky.

I’d love to just push a branch and type flyctl scale and stuff just ends up being clustered. (That’s probably already supported?).

Actually, I’m going to use fly for a couple of our projects. Just realized it. We’re tired of Linode and were prepping to move it all to AWS but I wasn’t looking forward to the devops maintenance for how small the projects currently are.

I actually would love to build an FaaS on top of elixir for our product, that’s ending up accidentally having low-code elements in it. The process isolation you get for nearly free seems like a no brainer for such a platform.

Another potential would be hosting Wordpress.

Having great tutorials for these use cases will be killer.

I have been surprised how little good tooling there is for Elixir, and even full stack in general.

Clustering is supported, you can set libcluster to use our internal DNS to discover nodes: https://github.com/fly-apps/phoenix-liveview-cluster/blob/ma...

You also need some environment variables: https://github.com/fly-apps/phoenix-liveview-cluster/blob/ma...

And a dockerfile: https://github.com/fly-apps/phoenix-liveview-cluster/blob/ma...

We definitely need tutorials. We're hiring someone specifically to work on the entire Elixir dev UX, so hopefully we'll improve soon.

I had more fun with this than I should have

Right? It's ridiculous.

This is a great demo, I definitely got a kick out of it and had some fun with a little javascript click loop ;-)

I'm surprised how well liveview copes with a flood of events. I've seen the latency indicator at the bottom spike at times, but it mostly just hums along.

That's a great demo! Have you written anything about LiveView + Fly?

Not yet, we want to make sure `fly launch` does a good job with Elixir apps first. We're close.

Love the live counter!!

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