Elixir deployments: our data on what the community needs

We asked the Elixir community what they consider key when planning a deployment; here’s what we found.

At the start of February we outlined a process for basic deployments of Elixir applications on AWS. There were a few holes in this, particularly around some of the shinier Elixir features, but before proceeding with tackling these we wanted to get a sense of what features the community felt were most important.

We set up a short survey, asking 3 questions we thought relevant to the subject, in an attempt to answer this. We left this open for 1 month, and thought our findings might be of interest to the community at large.

Full disclosure: I am not a data scientist, and haven’t done any real statistics work since school. Others may feel better qualified to analyse this data, or ask questions which are more useful gauges of our hypotheses. We’ve linked the raw responses at the end of the post.

Hypotheses

Here at Mint, we’re big fans of Elixir. We’re aware that deployment is sometimes painful, through our own experience, and through talk we’ve heard in the wider community.

With this in mind, we set out to test the following:

Auto-scaling with clustering is more likely a must-have than either auto-scaling or clustering, in isolation.

clustering is more likely a must-have than either auto-scaling clustering, in isolation. Most Elixir developers don’t much care about managing resources in a deployment target themselves. They simply want something that works out of the box.

Most developers just want a straight forward git push remote master type deployment command to handle releasing a new version of their app.

Methodology

Respondees were self-selecting: having found and chosen to read the blog post, they went on to fill out the survey with no promise of a reward. Given this, it seems reasonable to assume anyone responding has a fair interest in Elixir already.

We used 3 questions to test our hypotheses:

Which features would you consider a “must have” when planning a deployment?

How much control do you need over the resources you are running your application on?

How much control do you need over the deployment of your app?

Results

We kept the survey open for 28 days, from the 9th February, to 9th March. We had an overall total of 107 responses over this period.

Which of these features would you consider a “must have” when planning a deployment?