I think the discussion around deployment may have been unnecessarily tainted by their experience using edeliver - it's an automation layer for building and deploying releases, but as mentioned it is configured via shell scripts and because it does a lot, a lot can go wrong.<p>The basic unit of Elixir (and Erlang for that matter) deployments is the release. A release is just a tarball containing the bytecode of the application, configuration files, private data files, and some shell scripts for booting the application. Deployment is literally extracting the tarball to where you want the application deployed, and running `bin/myapp start` from the root of that folder which starts a daemon running the application. There is a `foreground` task as well which works well for running in containers.<p>My last Elixir gig prior to my current one used Docker + Kubernetes and almost all of our applications were Elixir, Erlang, or Go. It was extremely painless to use with releases, and our containers were tiny because the release package contained everything it needed to run, so the OS basically just needed a shell, and the shared libraries needed by the runtime (e.g. crypto).<p>My current job, we're deploying a release via RPM, and again, releases play really nicely with packaging in this way, particularly since the boot script which comes with the release takes care of the major tasks (start, stop, restart, upgrade/downgrade).<p>There are pain points with releases, but once you are aware of them (and they are pretty clearly documented), it's not really something which affects you. For example, if you bundle the Erlang runtime system (ERTS) in a release, you must deploy to the same OS/architecture as the machine you built the release on, and that machine needs to have all of the shared libraries installed which ERTS will need. If you don't bundle ERTS, but use one installed on the target machine, it must be the same version used to compile your application, because the compiled bytecode is shipped in the release. Those two issues can definitely catch you if you just wing a deployment, but they are documented clearly to help prevent that.<p>In short, if there was pain experienced, I think it may have been due to the particular tool they used - I don't think deployment in Elixir is difficult, outdated, or painful, but you do have to understand the tools you are using and how to take advantage of them, and I'm not sure that's different from any other language really.<p>Disclaimer: I'm the creator/maintainer of Distillery, the underlying release management tooling for Elixir, so I am obviously biased, but I also suspect I have more experience deploying Elixir applications than a lot of people, so hopefully it's a wash and I can be objective enough to chime in here.