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GigCityElixir23 - Bryan Hunter

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4 HN users recommended this talk5 months2023–2025 score 6
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

HN recommends it as a rare real-world look at a large fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system with no downtime in healthcare.

Bryan Hunter's GigCityElixir 2023 talk on HCA Healthcare's Waterpark system, built on Elixir/Erlang. It describes how the architecture is distributed and fault-tolerant, with a multi-datacenter cluster and runtime code swapping.

“an excellent presentation of design/architecture of a Real-World fault-tolerant and distributed System in Erlang/Elixir” (HN, 2023)

2 strong recommendations · 3 recommendations · 2 citations · Talks · intermediate

7 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@rramadass Jan 2024 Strongly recommends
on HN thread The Erlang Ecosystem (2018) [video]
After watching the above which gives one an idea of the Erlang System's capabilities, watch this presentation by Bryan Hunter where the design and architecture of a complete distributed and fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system is shown; You get to really see the mind-blowing power of the Erlang System in this - [this video]
Complete distributed fault-tolerant Erlang/Elixir system architecture
@notpublic Jun 2023 Recommends
on HN thread A LiveView Is a Process
This video may be of interest to you: [this video] Bryan Hunter explains how they do it at HCA healthcare (not specifically LiveView process, but processes in general).
Hunter explains how HCA healthcare uses processes
@GCUMstlyHarmls Dec 2024 Recommends
on HN thread Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)
This is a talk about a large scale, resilient elixir/erlang deployment in healthcare. Specifically they talk about running with no down time using hot code reloading here: [this video] but the whole talk is quite interesting regarding availability. Warning: the video is quite quiet.
Large-scale resilient healthcare deployment with no downtime

Citations, criticism and jokes

@darkmarmot Aug 2023 Cites it
on HN thread Unpacking Elixir: Concurrency
We use it across multiple versions of our software running in the same cluster. As long as you dark launch API changes, it's not much of an issue. [this video] (Doh, just realized I was replying to Mr. Elixir himself! And you're familiar with our project anyway :)
Talk on running multiple versions in a cluster
@darkmarmot Aug 2024 Cites it
on HN thread Constraining writers in distributed systems
We use something like this at scale, similar to Riak's design. We use it to store things like the active state of millions of hospital patients in RAM for high availability (zero downtime when DCs or nodes fail). One copy per data center with a writer at one of the DCs. Our current cluster has 32 nodes (8 per DC -- we should have 5 DCs across the US but only have 4 at the moment). You can learn more about it here: [this video] .
Describes the commenter's production system for patient state in RAM

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

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