Ship Your Code While It's Hot

ElixirConf Europe • Warsaw, Poland • 2018

Collage of some of the slides of the talk 'Ship Your Code While It Is Hot'

Erlang/OTP Releases

Learn the basics of how Elixir and Erlang/OTP Releases work.

Also known as: hot code reloading, runtime code replacement, dynamic software updating (DSU)

Albert Zak on stage at ElixirConf 2018 delivering the talk 'Ship Your Code While It Is Hot'

Abstract#

You built an app with Elixir, and now you want to deploy it.

Of course, you'll also want to ship upgrades, with no downtime, multiple times a day. Learn about an exciting and different kind of build pipeline that aims to make deployments boring non-events. Setting up a Continuous Delivery pipeline used to require going down the rabbit hole of OTP Releases.

This talk will also gently introduce some of the concepts and gotchas around Releases, hot code loading, appups/relups and show how the pieces fit together.

Target Audience#

You are confused by the documentation on Releases, and wondered what is necessary to get the code from your laptop into production. You may have tried some of the tooling contributed by the community.

You think there's a better way to do upgrades. You don't like the idea of incrementing version numbers, writing appups, and scp'ing tar files. You just want downtime-free Continuous Delivery, without ceremony.

Objectives#

Learn the basic concepts of how OTP Releases and hot code loading work.
Get to know the architecture of BeamUp, a new build and deployment pipeline.
Start to continuously deliver your Elixir/Erlang projects.