Everyone talks about Elixir being scalable, fault-tolerant, functional, actor-based, and distributed. But let’s get real: the only thing your boss cares about is cutting costs.
So here’s how I optimized our Elixir system to save real money — not just theoretical “efficiency points” in some Hacker News thread.
1. OTP: Outsourcing To Processes
Each Elixir process costs only a few KB of memory. Compare that to Java threads (they eat memory like your uncle at a buffet).
Result? Instead of renting a small AWS island, I’m now surviving happily on a free-tier canoe.
💰 Cost saved: “Goodbye, t3.2xlarge. Hello, t3.micro.”
2. BEAM Garbage Collector: Marie Kondo for Memory
The BEAM VM has per-process garbage collection. Translation: instead of a global stop-the-world meltdown, each process tidies up its own mess like a polite roommate.
This cut down our RAM bill so hard, I felt guilty. But not guilty enough to tell AWS.
💰 Cost saved: “We don’t need 64 GB RAM, Karen. We need therapy.”
3. Phoenix Channels: Slack for Servers
We replaced our “real-time API” (read: a Kafka cluster with the personality of a tax auditor) with Phoenix Channels. Suddenly, we had millions of live connections on one box without needing a fleet of Kubernetes nodes.
💰 Cost saved: “From 30 Kafka brokers → 1 Elixir app + vibes.”
4*. Hot Code Reloading: The Netflix Trick
*
Deploying without downtime means no rolling restarts, no duplicate environments, no “who left this Kubernetes pod running for six months?” incidents.
💰 Cost saved: “Our CI/CD bill shrank faster than my hairline.”
*5. Pattern Matching: Firing If-Else Statements
*
In other languages, you write 200 lines of if-else spaghetti. In Elixir, you just let pattern matching do the work.
Result: fewer bugs → fewer on-call emergencies → fewer DevOps engineers rage-quitting.
💰 Cost saved: “Recruiter fees for replacing burned-out devs.”
6. ETS: Free Redis (But With Vibes)
Elixir’s ETS tables are basically in-memory key-value stores baked into the VM. That’s right: you don’t need Redis for half your caching problems.
💰 Cost saved: “Bye-bye, managed Redis cluster bill.”
7. Supervision Trees: Netflix for Crashes
When processes crash, they get back up faster than your cousin after chugging an energy drink. Automatic restarts mean fewer PagerDuty alerts and fewer “why is prod down?” all-nighters.
💰 Cost saved: “Time → money. And sleep → priceless.”
*📉 Final Tally
*
With all these, our infra bill dropped so much that the finance team thought it was a bug. No bug — just Elixir being Elixir.
AWS, GCP, and Azure all hate me now. My boss doesn’t. That’s ROI.
⚡ Conclusion: If you want real-world cost-cutting optimizations, don’t chase shiny frameworks. Just unleash the BEAM, sit back, and let Erlang’s 30 years of “telecom austerity mode” pay your bills.
Top comments (1)
email me so you can save money and save $100k ;)