Hot take: Everyone now uses k8s, I don't get why forcing our devops team to learn OTP and understand how to integrate Elixir with k8s is a benefit, it will only be harder for them. So you get most of the benefits like scalablity/reliability etc even if you're on the Rails - but you don't have to expose junior devs to a complicated and obscure stack like Elixir.
All those people using k8s don't include any of my customers. Current projects are Django sites running on VMs, Rails sites on a kind of Heroku service and a Phoenix app running on VMs plus some Elixir services running on Google Cloud serverless services.
Actually the latter is a candidate to k8s because the team knows less and less of server management. I think they are going to replace complexity with complexity for something that fits well in a small VM. We will see.
No offense taken. Small contractor, small customers. The long tail doesn't need fancy technologies devised by companies that have to serve billions of users and yet a lot of people live there.
About Elixir, I don't think it's an overkill. I find its pattern matching much better than anything similar in Python and Ruby. Running a background job without having to use Celery or Sidekiq is great. The deploy story is worse than Ruby's (IMHO) in part because it's compiled (I prefer to deploy with Capistrano than having to build and deploy.) Python's deploy story just doesn't exist. According to the project I'm using a self made Capistrano equivalent, git pull or sending git patches to the server.
I'm sure you serve them well with Elixir. All these technologies are good enough. You wouldn't be able to build stuff for them in PHP/Ruby/Java? You would, but you prefer Elixir because you think it's superior and thats fine. But even if its superior you have to agree equivalent stuff is being built in 15 other stacks.
Technology choice is a bit overrated imo.
Actually the customer chose Elixir. They found me because there weren't many Elixir developers in my country when the project started years ago. I prefer Ruby for my own stuff which of course is way smaller than customers projects.
