Volker Rabe

A Transmuting Journey: From a Ruby on Rails Monolith to Elixir and Elm Microservices

MyMeds&Me is a startup company based in central London that provides a software as a service for pharmaceuticals to track the side effects of medications in a systematical way and exports the reports in a standardised format for the clients safety system. The current application is based on Ruby on Rails, Postgres and ElasticSearch and is hosted per client in a virtualised infrastructure managed by Puppet at a GxP compliant hosting provider. On the verge to grow the business we face some fundamental issues with the Rails application and it's architectural design. In order to grow the business and be able to scale the Dev team we had to find solutions for it. We addressed the issues in a new platform with a quite different approach. Different to Ruby on Rails but also probably to a typical Elixir/Phoenix application. In this session I want to present the solution we came up with and share the experience we made in this transmuting journey from a Ruby on Rails monolith to Elixir and Elm microservices.

Talk objectives

What are the benefits and drawbacks of using an event-driven microservice architecture? Why did we need a new infrastructure approach? Why did we choose Elixir? Why didn't we use a distributed Elixir application? Why did we choose Elm for frontend services? Which challenges we had to face? How was the transition phase for the team?

Target audience

Elixir and Erlang developers with any range of experience interested in software architecture and design.