Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs

Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs by impulser_ on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @05:44AM (#37305317)

It more than just server costs. They reduced the complexity of their services by a lot.

Having to maintain 95% less servers is worth it even if they didn't save any money IMO.

This also could lead to them reducing their engineering team that maintains these services which would reduce costs even more.

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Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs by paxys on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @08:09AM (#37306517)

Can switching to an esoteric functional language from Python and Java really be considered reducing complexity? No matter how well it is written, I'm willing to bet that way fewer people in the company/industry understand the new codebase and can make changes to it.

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Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs by weatherlight on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @02:44PM (#37312085)

> Can switching to an esoteric functional language from Python and Java really be considered reducing complexity?

It's not esoteric. It's a modern programing language, with 35 years behind its Virtual machine.

1 in 3 phone calls you've ever made was routed through a telephon switch written in a lang implemented in BEAM virtual machine.

WhatsApp was written in a lang implemented on the BEAM.

> I'm willing to bet that way fewer people in the company/industry understand the new codebase and can make changes to it.

It's really not hard to learn. It's not Haskell, It's not Coq, It's not Brainfuck.

You could pick up the syntax and the major semantics in a weekend.

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Re:Elixir Saves Pinterest $2M a Year in Server Costs by robbintt on Tuesday August 29, 2023 @09:23PM (#37316487)

This isn't a huge difference most of the time. Once you have cluster management at scale, 3 vs 3000 are pretty similar.

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