The thing to remember about Elixir/Erlang is that it gives you a lot of deployment options. There's this mix of concerns with deployment tooling to both support all of those options and be simple at the same time, which is tough to achieve.

Just as an example, with many Java App Servers you deploy your packaged java code and it automatically handles seamless deployment across the cluster with zero downtime. And there are lots of different server options.

With languages using K8's and Docker, you're deploying a configured container across a system that will help manage the same thing.

Distillery has been the standard for deployments with Elixir for a while now and supports everything. Releases are slowly rolling this functionality into the core, but don't currently support all of the options that you get with distillery.

But with the BEAM you've got clustering built in. You've got hot reloading options which literally deploy your new code in the middle of running code without so much as dropping a socket connection. You get the ability to roll that back too.

It's a little more complicated because it comes with a lot of very unique options that are built in instead of delegated to another system.