title: Where does Elixir/erlang fit into the microservices approach?
body: <p>Lately I've been doing some experiments with docker compose in order to deploy multiple collaborating microservices. I can see the many benefits that microservices provide, and now that there is a good toolset for managing them, I think that it's not extremely hard to jump into the microservices wagon.</p>
  
  <p>But, I have been experimenting with Elixir too, and I am quite fond of the benefits that provides by itself. Given that it encourages packing your code into multiple decoupled applications, and supports hot code upgrades, how would you mix docker with elixir (or erlang, for that matter)?</p>
  
  <p>For example, if I want to use docker because it provides dev-prod parity, how does elixir fit in that? Given that docker containers are immutable, I lose the ability to do hot-code upgrades, right? What about blue/green deployments or canary releases?</p>
  
  <p>I mean, I could just write microservices with Elixir and use them as if they were written in any other language, polyglotism is one of the benefits of microservices anyway, but then I'm not getting the full benefits of using the OTP platform, I guess that pure collaborative erlang applications are way more optimal that using intermediate queues to communicate between microservices written in different (or not) languages.</p>