The Elixir programming language is well known in the world of software where uptime is critical to business success. The official description states, “Elixir is a dynamic, functional language for building scalable and maintainable applications.” This is a humble summary of the enormous power Elixir contains, which has saved businesses millions of dollars per year across industries.

The book “Adopting Elixir, From Concept to Production (2018)“ by Ben Marx, José Valim, Bruce Tate is an excellent guide to the strategic and technical reasons to use Elixir in your business. The very first chapter clearly illustrates the benefits.

Pinterest used Elixir for focused, high-volume, high-impact service around performance tooling and monitoring. Steve Cohen is a software engineer who’s been working with their early adoption teams:

José: Why did you choose Elixir?

Steve: We chose Elixir because we were looking for a system that was easy for programmers to understand and could take better advantage of our servers. I was intrigued at Elixir’s combination of friendly syntax, powerful metaprogramming features, and incorporation of the Actor model.

José: How has your company benefited from Elixir?

Steve: That’s pretty easy. When I started on the spam team, we had close to 1,400 servers running. When we converted several parts to Elixir, we reduced that by around 95%. One of the systems that ran on 200 Python servers now runs on four Elixir servers (it can actually run on two servers, but we felt that four provided more fault tolerance). The combined effect of better architecture and Elixir saved Pinterest over $2 million per year in server costs. In addition, the performance and reliability of the systems went up despite running on drastic