• Written by Abbie - Elixir Talent Scout @ Beam it •
We are seeing an ever-growing increase of companies transitioning to use Elixir in order to develop and improve their platforms. I have previously looked into different companies using Elixir in Germany and in this article I have researched US companies who have discovered the benefits of this functional language.
Below are five different US companies using Elixir in production within varying industries from communication to e-commerce. Each of these companies have seen many improvements after adopting Elixir including reliability, fault-tolerance, concurrency and reducing the size of their servers.
Let’s take a closer look…
1. WhatsApp - https://www.whatsapp.com/
WhatsApp is a free platform offering reliable messaging and calling on all mobile phones across the world. WhatsApp started as an alternative to SMS but now allows for sending and receiving all kinds of media including texts, group chats, voice & video calls, photos, videos, documents and location. The application has been built with end-to-end encryption, keeping their customers information private and secured.
The founders of WhatsApp Brian Acton and Jay Koum made the decision to use Erlang as the foundation of their messaging platform. They believed this was the way forward to creating a robust, fault-tolerant and reliable application. WhatsApp was written fully in Erlang and has been further improved by introducing Elixir powered elements. Now more than 2 billion people across 180 countries use WhatsApp as a means to stay in contact with their friends and family, no matter where they are.
2. Adobe - https://www.adobe.com/
Adobe is a digital and media technology solutions company that develops software applications with a creative design edge. They aim to bridge the gap between art and technology, connect content and data as well as introducing new technologies. They offer platforms for teachers, students, creators, videographers and more.
Adobe uses Elixir to build a combined client / cloud application for a collaborative photography workflow.
3. Pinterest - https://www.pinterest.co.uk/
Pinterest is a worldwide, popular visual search engine which allows their users to browse and find ideas for recipes, home, style and more. They can create their own personalised, inspirational and organised boards by pinning their favourite ideas. They can also share their boards with other users and friends.
Pinterest transitioned to Elixir in 2014 and by 2018 they had over 250 million people using their application. Their platform needs to process thousands of requests and events per second and Elixir made this successful. The shift from Java to Elixir improved the performance of the platform and allowed developers to reduce the code from 10,000 lines to just 1000 as well as allowing them to use half the amount of servers. Their system is now faster and more consistent.
