Flora is a Data Integration Engineer at HCA Healthcare, where she gets to write Elixir every day. After studying physics, math, and writing, she worked as a puppeteer, bartender, marketer, and writer before learning Elixir to build hobby projects with Nerves. She lives in her hometown of New Orleans with her husband, 3 children, and one loud cat.
HCA’s Waterpark data integration engine is a continuously available streaming system; it’s also a distributed database that never touches disk. Waterpark accomplishes this by utilizing built-in features of Elixir and the BEAM. Each message in the endless streams arriving in Waterpark is routed across the geographically distributed cluster to the relevant actor processes for exactly-once processing without depending on external broker dependencies such as RabbitMQ or Kafka. How does our team build and maintain this unique system? This talk will discuss a few key tools: the Publish-Subscribe Messaging Pattern, micro-batching, queuing theory, and more. You’ll see how we use these tools, along with core BEAM features, to safely and reliably store messages from a publication within our application, until they are sent to a subscriber. And we’ll share the lessons we learned along the way.
TALK OBJECTIVES:
Discuss how to store messages from a publication as part of the Publish-Subscribe model in Elixir and Erlang distributed systems.
TARGET AUDIENCE:
Erlang, Elixir & distributed systems developers