GigCityElixir23 - Bryan Hunter

Groxio4 HN recommenders · 2023–2025
10K views · talk · evergreen · Uploaded 2023-06-07

Bryan Hunter's GigCityElixir 2023 talk on HCA Healthcare's Waterpark system, built on Elixir/Erlang. It describes how the architecture is distributed and fault-tolerant, with a multi-datacenter cluster and runtime code swapping.

HN recommends it as a rare real-world look at a large fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system with no downtime in healthcare.

Watch on YouTube

7 comments from Hacker News

@notpublic2023 · in “A LiveView Is a Process”

This video may be of interest to you: [VIDEO] Bryan Hunter explains how they do it at HCA healthcare (not specifically LiveView process, but processes in general).

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@darkmarmot2023 · in “Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency”

We use it across multiple versions of our software running in the same cluster. As long as you dark launch API changes, it's not much of an issue. [VIDEO] (Doh, just realized I was replying to Mr. Elixir himself! And you're familiar with our project anyway :)

@rramadass2023 · in “Ask HN: Good examples of fault-tolerant Erlang code?”

Not code but an excellent presentation of design/architecture of a Real-World fault-tolerant and distributed System in Erlang/Elixir - [VIDEO]

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@rramadass2024 · in “The Erlang Ecosystem (2018) [video]”

After watching the above which gives one an idea of the Erlang System's capabilities, watch this presentation by Bryan Hunter where the design and architecture of a complete distributed and fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system is shown; You get to really see the mind-blowing power of the Erlang System in this - [VIDEO]

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@darkmarmot2024 · in “Constraining writers in distributed systems”

We use something like this at scale, similar to Riak's design. We use it to store things like the active state of millions of hospital patients in RAM for high availability (zero downtime when DCs or nodes fail). One copy per data center with a writer at one of the DCs. Our current cluster has 32 nodes (8 per DC -- we should have 5 DCs across the US but only have 4 at the moment). You can learn more about it here: [VIDEO] .

@GCUMstlyHarmls2024 · in “Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)”

This is a talk about a large scale, resilient elixir/erlang deployment in healthcare. Specifically they talk about running with no down time using hot code reloading here: [VIDEO] but the whole talk is quite interesting regarding availability. Warning: the video is quite quiet.

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@chantepierre2025 · in “Leveraging Elixir's hot code loading capabilities to modularize a monolithic app”

To add to this topic, people who do not know about erlang's hot code loading should watch this talk : [VIDEO] A multi-DC running cluster where parts are progressively swapped at runtime. No database, only OTP.

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