You make an app using Ruby on Rails, keep developing it, and it keeps growing. You monitor your traffic and it gets bigger, now you add more servers to handle the traffic (it costs you $20/server, now you need 4). A couple more developments, memory usage starts to grow also.. Now, you need to increase memory of your server.. but now you also need Websockets, so you add both and need to add more resources to handle the scale, and the cycle continues.
When you use Elixir/Erlang and it’s BEAM VM, it’s highly efficient and scalable out of the box, so you won’t need to do “much” of the above. A simplistic explanation but shows the point.
OK, so in real life maybe the costs can actually be an order of magnitude higher than this.
But for $60/$80 a month? Is like no money.
That is less than one hour of time for even a cheap developer including taxes and other overhead, or okay call it two hours a month of time if you want to be generous. So if Elixir instead of Rails (or, of course worse, _switching_ to Elixir from current Rails) takes more than, say, 24 hours of developer time in a year... you didn't save money.
OK I'm not working on Google scale, but for the vast majority of companies I don't think this actually matters that much. If it's all about budget than I would hire PHP devs instead of Elixir cos cheaper! No it doesn't make sense sorry. For the small amount of companies where this actually matters you'd still need to convince me how java/.net/Go can't get it right.
ok maybe this make a difference. I can train a junior on elixir and have them writing code that I am confident won't break the system in prod within three months. I can't do that in any of the other languages, I would have to buy a senior.
You make an app using Ruby on Rails, keep developing it, and it keeps growing. You monitor your traffic and it gets bigger, now you add more servers to handle the traffic (it costs you $20/server, now you need 4). A couple more developments, memory usage starts to grow also.. Now, you need to increase memory of your server.. but now you also need Websockets, so you add both and need to add more resources to handle the scale, and the cycle continues.
When you use Elixir/Erlang and it’s BEAM VM, it’s highly efficient and scalable out of the box, so you won’t need to do “much” of the above. A simplistic explanation but shows the point.