Shipping Greenfield Elixir in a Legacy World
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Expertise
- Target audience This course is for anyone that wants to bring Elixir into your existing tech stack; those interested in event-driven design, and those interested in working with message brokers like RabbitMQ.
- Duration 2 half-days
- Prerequisites
Moderate Elixir experience is a plus but no prior knowledge of RabbitMQ or Google Protobuf is assumed.
How to build autonomous, event-driven systems with Elixir, RabbitMQ and Google Protobuf.
You’ve built a monolith, but the constraints of your legacy system are slowing you down. You love working with Elixir—Supervisors, built-in distribution, and fault tolerance make it a great fit for the needs of your team and your product—but a rewrite would be expensive and time consuming. If only there was a way to seamlessly integrate a new Elixir application into your ecosystem. Well, there is a way to do exactly that! In this course, we’ll show you how to build autonomous, event-driven systems with Elixir, RabbitMQ and Google Protobuf that let you decouple the data your ecosystem creates from the systems that create them. This opens the path to greenfield applications, and Elixir, in your legacy world.
OBJECTIVES
Elixir and Inter-Process Communication create the blueprint for integrating Elixir into your existing tech stack. By the end of the day, you’ll understand when and why to reach for IPC and how to leverage Elixir’s fault-tolerance and concurrency capabilities to create an event-driven system that seamlessly brings Elixir into your existing ecosystem.
You’ll learn how to identify scenarios that can benefit from IPC, and then we’ll dive right into building an IPC system. Starting with the basics of RabbitMQ and how to interact with it in Elixir, we’ll move on to discussing the challenges of message synchronization and how Google Protobuf solves some of these problems.
You’ll see how Elixir’s concurrency and fault tolerance features–in particular supervision trees and the “let it crash” mentality–make Elixir the perfect fit for building IPC. We’ll wrap up with a look at some deployment concerns and strategies.
COVERS THE FOLLOWING TOPICS
- Inter-Process Communication (IPC) and event-driven design
- Working with RabbitMQ and Elixir
- Working with Google Protobuf and Elixir
WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND THIS COURSE
You’ll have a path forward to integrating greenfield Elixir applications into your legacy system, in a way that your team can deliver on, while still meeting the needs of your business.
You’ll learn how to think about event-driven systems, by creating an ecosystem of rich messages whose utility extends beyond their source application, moving you towards a Microservice-Oriented Architecture.
You’ll see all the ways in which Elixir is the perfect fit for such a system.

Sophie deBenedetto
Senior Engineer at GitHubSophie works on tools that power software collaboration around the world. As a former teacher and student at The Flatiron School, she is passionate about providing tech education to a broad audience and helping people change their lives through code. That’s why she jumped at the chance to join the team at Elixir School, a free open source Elixir curriculum. She is the co-author, alongside Bruce Tate, of Pragmatic Bookshelf’s upcoming book on LiveView. Historically she is a cat person, but will admit to owning a dog.

Steven Nunez
Senior Engineer at GitHubSteven is obsessed with learning and loves to share his findings with others. When he's not coding, you can find him at a carpentry class or building a friction fire.