We make it easy to deploy clusters of Elixir applications that can talk privately between themselves. And so we can do analysis and visualization directly off the models in our applications. Livebook notebooks can talk directly to running Elixir apps. That's because Elixir has powerful built-in clustering, built on Erlang's BEAM/OTP runtime. But it turns out that code notebooks on Elixir are something special they do something you usually can't pull off in Python. Livebook started out as Elixir's version of Jupyter Notebooks. This is where Livebook can help! Why is Livebook Better? However, when a project is young and you're a developer, digging with code is powerful. This is fine when you want a dedicated data dashboard or you want to let non-developers see reports and graphs and be business-intelligent. In fact, Metabase ships a Docker image and Fly lets you quickly deploy apps using Docker. We sell hosting, so we're generally OK with that. It's also an app you need to keep running. It can be a heavy tool when you just want to do some quick poking around. It's also a bit of a mammoth – one doesn't just walk into Metabase and expect to get anything done, there's a real learning curve even when you know how to write SQL. Metabase is an application that probably shouldn't be exposed publicly and it needs direct access to your database. Think of it as Grafana, but for MBAs – it's a great tool.ĭeploying Metabase alongside your app might look like this: You can even create and share custom dashboards. It connects directly to an application's database and helps you do some spelunking, aggregation, and shiny graphing. Metabase, for example, is an open source BI tool that works quite well. But there's a handful of credible open source projects. Spotting trends in your data and customer behavior can make the difference of success and failure for a company. But it's because they add a lot of value. You hear some of the numbers and it seems bananas. Let's see what we're up against.Ĭompanies spend lots of money every year on their BI tools. Our premise in this post is that we can give "serious" BI tools a run for their money with Elixir and Livebook. To understand why Livebook can be a better tool, let's go further and talk about BI tools in general, not just your REPL. Livebook gives you data, charts and graphs too, but because it's executing your Elixir code, it can also call out to your other integrations and pull in even more. If you're using the Rails console, Elixir's iex, or another REPL to examine your data, then that's your BI tool for now. At a startup before that, we did the same thing but using the Rails console. In that early stage startup, we were using iex as our BI tool. We ran some scripts and gave them CSV friendly rows they could add to their spreadsheets. How did we get those answers? Using our Elixir iex, or interactive shell. That's why global insurance companies with applications that are too complicated to bring up a Rails console on spend six figures on BI suites. Who are our top 10 customers this week and what were their numbers?Īs simple as this stuff seems, it's really important for those business focused leaders to understand and make better decisions.How many new clients did we add this week?.In the last bootstrapped startup I worked at, management routinely asked backend developers for business numbers. Translated from Gartner-speak, that means any tools you run to get a picture of how the business is doing are BI tools. for the data analysis of business information. BI What?īusiness intelligence (BI) comprises the strategies and technologies used. And for problems like this, Livebook can be a better BI tool for Elixir developers. It may not seem super sophisticated, but it solves the business need. Well, give yourself a raise! Because you just built a BI suite. You'd SSH into your server, start an Elixir iex session or a Rails console, then run some scripts to query data, sum numbers, and come up with answers. But you're not, so how did you answer it for them? You should try deploying an Elixir app, right now: it only takes a few minutes.Īs a developer, has your manager ever come and asked a question like, "How much money are we making?" If you were a line-of-business developer at a global insurance company, you'd reach for your handy, nosebleed-expensive Business Intelligence (BI) suite to answer this question. Fly runs apps (and databases) close to users, by taking Docker images and transmogrifying them into Firecracker micro-vms, running on our hardware around the world.
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