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GigCityElixir23 - Bryan Hunter

Groxio · talk · Watch on YouTube

Distributed systemsFunctional programming

What it is

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.

Why Hacker News recommends it

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

  • 4 people recommended it
  • 5 different months
  • 2 strong recommendations
  • first 2023, last 2025

What HN commenters said

  1. “an excellent presentation of design/architecture of a Real-World fault-tolerant and distributed System in Erlang/Elixir”

    Design of a real-world fault-tolerant distributed Erlang system

    rramadass, 2023-12 · Strong recommendation · in “Ask HN: Good examples of fault-tolerant Erlang code?”

  2. “Bryan Hunter explains how they do it at HCA healthcare”

    Hunter explains how HCA healthcare uses processes

    notpublic, 2023-06 · Recommendation · in “A LiveView Is a Process”

  3. “the whole talk is quite interesting regarding availability”

    Large-scale resilient healthcare deployment with no downtime

    GCUMstlyHarmls, 2024-12 · Recommendation · in “Elixir/Erlang Hot Swapping Code (2016)”

  4. “people who do not know about erlang's hot code loading should watch this talk”

    Multi-DC cluster with parts progressively swapped at runtime

    chantepierre, 2025-07 · Recommendation · in “Leveraging Elixir's hot code loading capabilities to modularize a monolithic app”

Excerpts from Hacker News comments, linked to the originals. Summaries and labels were written by a language model from those comments.

Topics: elixir, erlang, hot code loading, healthcare, distributed systems, beam

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