Choosing which language to use when developing software is if one of the main tasks for developers. With the use of Elixir becoming more popular over recent years, many companies have dedided to switch over when it comes to choosing which code to use.
Here are a few different companies who have made such a switch, and why they chose to do so:-
Moz
In 2016 Moz decided to improve their search engine performance, thus overhauling their backend architecture. This is when they decided to change over from using Ruby to Elixir in production. By making the switch to Elixir they were able to use smaller data files, which in turn reduced their disk space by a massive 63 times. They were also able to increase the speed of their API by 20 times compared to their previous one. Overall, it enable them to speed up their total build speed by 30 times.
Financial Times
The Financial Times has been a well known and well respected publication since 1888. Alongside their newspaper they also run a very successful online service, with over 1 million paying customers. They originally used microservice REST APIs, but they recently made the switch over to Elixir so they can enjoy a much smaller memory usage compared to using Java. Their mobile app is also built with Elixir. One of the main advantages was that Elixir was a lot easier for the development team to learn.
Bleacher Report
The Bleacher Report is part of Turner Sports, and is the 2nd largest sports website in the world. They send out more than 3 billion push notifications a month and have approx 1.5 billion monthly page views. The originally used Ruby on Rails, but the traffic growth made this unscalable. They also struggled to support their Team Stream app, and needed a solution. They tried many solutions but nothing seemed to work as they intendedThis is where Elixir came to the rescue. It’s main advantages being a cleaner code, having a smaller technical debt and having an increase in development speed.
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is a global travel company, with millions of unique monthly visitors to their website and apps. Due to the rich nature of the content they were producing, they ended up being stuck behind Ruby on Rails apps and needed a solution to this. What they needed was to be able to serve it to web and mobile apps quicker and at scale. This called for a different data model, a cleaner API, and a much more scalable infrastructure. They tried many different approaches must to no avail, until they hired a development team who wrote in Elixir. This gave them better performance and a reduction in required storage. Another microservice written in Elixir now serves their inventory of books and ebooks from a custom eCommerce system backed by a Microsoft SQL server.
