Companies using Elixir

PagerDuty

PagerDuty uses Elixir extensively. Here’s a list of articles and talks where they talk about their use of it:

• Elixir at PagerDuty blogpost from Cees de Groot.
• How I Centralized Our Scattered Business Logic Into One Clear Pipeline For Our Elixir Webhook Service blogpost by Michael Viveros.
• ElixirConf 2019: Elixir + CQRS - Architecting for Availability, Operability, and Maintainability At PagerDuty - Jon Grieman

  • Elixir’s our primary language, and has been for some time now. There’s still some older services predating our choice of Elixir, but less and less of them as time goes on and things are replaced. Outside of special cases like our mobile client apps, I don’t believe there’s any team in engineering that doesn’t work with Elixir on a frequent, if not exclusive, basis.

    (https://elixirforum.com/t/elixirconf-2019-elixir-cqrs-architecting-for-availability-operability-and-maintainability-at-pagerduty-jon-grieman/25188/4)

Discord

The entire backend of Discord runs on Elixir (with some performance-critical pieces in Rust ¹). Their CTO has written that if they had to go back and start over, they would definitely choose the same path again ², and he’s not the only one with that sentiment. ³

Here’s a list of articles where they talk about how they’re using Elixir:

• How Discord Scaled Elixir to 5,000,000 Concurrent Users
• Using Rust to Scale Elixir for 11 Million Concurrent Users
• How Discord handles push request bursts of over a million per minute with Elixir’s GenStage

Heroku

Heroku’s router is written in Erlang ⁴.

The Vault team was first to use Elixir inside Heroku ⁵. Their team is responsible for licensing and financial services, such as invoicing, credit card payments, etc. Most of their services are used internally at Heroku.

Around 2018, Heroku’s front-end team also began using Elixir ⁵. The team has 21 engineers: about 4 of them doing Elixir full-time, and 8 engineers altogether doing Elixir here and there. They continue using Elixir because they feel productive and happy with it. They have also found it is an easier language to maintain compared to their previous experiences.

Remote

Remote (re)wrote their entire platform in Elixir around September of 2019 ⁶.

Community

Community is powered by the Erlang Ecosystem, with Elixir and RabbitMQ playing central roles ⁷.

Papercups

Papercups is a startup building an open source customer messaging product (similar to Intercom).

Papercups is built on top of an Elixir/Phoenix API and PostgreSQL database, with Oban being used for workers and job processing ⁸.

Metrist

Metrist builds an observability tool that functionally tests and monitors cloud products (like AWS, Azure, Stripe) as well as IT-related tools (Zoom, Jira) and general SaaS-style vendors (Stripe, Humi). From a range of actions, like looking at status pages, actively monitoring APIs, and observing how our customers’ production systems interact with them they try to distill a summarized status so their users know first when something is amiss with any of their vendors.

They wrote their Orchestrator in Elixir, after considering C# as an alternative. ⁹ After the success there, they then rewrote their C# serverless/microservices backend to Elixir as well. ^{10 11}