I'm considering migrating to Phoenix and my biggest concern is ease of deployment
Even 6 years ago when I started, you could just run it in production with `mix phx.server`, much like running `rails server` and use the exact same deployment patterns. Or you could build a release and copy it up to the server however you saw fit. At that time it was painful for some coming from different habits that involved pulling in config at run-time rather than compile time, but those patterns have also been supported since at least 2019.
Since then, the team has been continually making it easier.
Now there's a single command line to do a deploy to Fly and also one to build a docker container for you if that's what you want: https://twitter.com/chris_mccord/status/1468998944009166849
I would take a look at render.com. they support connected nodes and autodiscovery
Also, higher performance translates to lower machine costs. Our server costs would easily be 4x if we ran rails. given that elixir is 80-90% as productive for writing code in the short term, its a fair deal. Over the long term, we've found elixir to be more maintainable since there's very little magic and the immutable data structures and lack of magic make it super easy to debug.
Thanks to the performance of our system, we've also managed to get by without setting up caching. (we'll probably need it eventually but our performance gains have come mostly though fine tuning our sql queries. Ecto gives us way better control over the output sql than active record or sequalize)
People who pay for those extra boxes? Not everybody has your budget (especially when they're building things themselves, on the side, so they aren't even paid).
This is not surprising: the Elixir folks were fairly high-visibility in the Ruby community before they did Elixir and Phoenix.
There's really nothing I miss about Ruby for web dev and Elixir feels like a complete win to me these days. Ruby is still far nicer for unix-y scripting, though.
I meant something more like "of course there's a function for that with the name you'd expect".
I've never used Redis in any of my Elixir/Phoenix apps. In cases where I might need something like Redis to store state, I'd reach for a GenServer or maybe Mnesia instead. I've never had an issue with deployments using this strategy. Also, K8s and BEAM work together just fine using libcluster. I'm not a fan of K8s or Docker and don't use either one, but you easily can.
The benefit of BEAM is that it can surgically handle a vast array of failures without restarting the node. K8s, on the other hand, will take the pod down and restart it. In many cases, solving a problem with BEAM is like using tweezers to remove a splinter whereas K8s is more like using a sledgehammer.
And I see nothing wrong with having the BEAM run in Docker or K8s. There's some overlap in concepts, but they work at totally different layers. Using the BEAM is like having resilient microservices _inside_ your app with none of the downsides.
That said, I'm _really_ excited to get into all the goodness that Rails 7 has to offer. I really thought they lost their way with the whole webpacker debacle. I recently installed a fresh Rails 7 app and the word webpack doesn't even exist anymore! It's like a breath of fresh air to be done with that. Those were some dark days. (I'm exaggerating only a little)
