Margaret

Margaret

Editor at PragProg

AMA with: Ellie Fairholm and Josep Giralt D'Lacoste (codebar Winter Lit Fest)

Ask Me Anything with
Ellie Fairholm and Josep Giralt D’Lacoste
@elliefairholm and @Gilacost

On February 24 and 25, we are giving you a chance to ask questions of PragProg authors Ellie Fairholm and Josep Giralt D’Lacoste as part of our Winter Literary Festival in partnership with codebar.

Ellie Fairholm is a full-stack developer on the path to becoming a solutions architect. She excels at communication and believes that no topic is too difficult to learn. She is deeply passionate about making technology available to all, especially to those often underrepresented in the industry. She currently lives in the UK and is committed to working on projects that will one day change the world.

Pep G. D’Lacoste is the founder of BeamOps Software Consultancy, a company that takes a hands-on approach to simplifying BEAM projects and ensuring lasting sustainability by involving the whole team. He has been working with Elixir for 10 years and helped set up the Elixir Meetup in his home town of Barcelona. He now lives in the UK and is on a mission to empower developers and revolutionize the way technical teams operate.

Ellie Fairholm and Josep Giralt D’Lacoste are the authors of Engineering Elixir Applications. Ask them about programming, DevOps, Elixir, or anything else—really!

Everyone commenting or asking a question will automatically be entered into a drawing to win one of the authors’ books.

In addition, from February 24 to March 2, as part of our Winter Literary Festival with codebar, you can use promo code 2025WinterFest to save 40 percent on purchases at pragprog.com. We’ll donate 20 percent of the net income from the promotion back to codebar after the event.

Offer not valid where prohibited or restricted. Offer not valid on previous purchases. The Pragmatic Programmer: 20th Anniversary Edition is not eligible for discounts, as we do not publish it.

Hit Reply to post your question below. The authors will check in periodically to answer your questions.

Most Liked

swrenn

swrenn

I didn’t know there was a talk. This looks like it, for anyone else who might be interested.

alvinkatojr

alvinkatojr

Yep @swrenn that’s the talk. It’s a pretty good one. I personally think it sells/advertises the book and the BeamOPS mission pretty well.

Gilacost

Gilacost

Author of Engineering Elixir Applications

Thank you for your question! I really appreciate that you enjoyed the book!

I haven’t used FLAME on AWS, and I don’t think there’s a straightforward way to implement it using native AWS resources unless you’re running a kites cluster and leveraging the FLAME kites backend.

From my perspective, Fly.io is a much better fit as a backend for FLAME because it spins up VMs extremely quickly and securely. I believe they achieve this using Firecracker under the hood, which is also what AWS uses to run Lambda functions. This backend effectively handles ephemeral VMs and provides a scalable networking layer, making it a solid choice for FLAME.

The FLAME kites backend, on the other hand, only allows you to assign resources if they are available in the node pool and can create pods, but it doesn’t offer the same level of dynamic VM provisioning.

AWS Lambda does support running Docker images, but these run in complete isolation, meaning you wouldn’t be able to connect them as distributed Erlang nodes as far as I know. Because of that, Lambda isn’t a viable option for FLAME in a distributed Elixir setup.

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