A lot of what Erlang/Elixir offer have been cribbed by cloud architecture, so in terms of direct comparisons you may find that a sufficiently well-architected microservices system has similar properties and will make Erlang/Elixir less desirable.
But Erlang/Elixir can probably accomplish many of those properties at a fraction of the cost.
The core advantages of these languages are (a) a runtime which is highly optimized for running a large set of preemptable concurrent tasks with very minimal shared memory and (b) an ecosystem designed around building fault-tolerant applications out of many independent communicating processes that "supervise" one another to detect failures and gracefully heal them.
There are many details about how those things work, but I'll reiterate: together they offer a system with many robustness properties similar to that of an idealized large microservices architecture but with much less complexity and cost.
> A lot of what Erlang/Elixir offer have been cribbed by cloud architecture, so in terms of direct comparisons you may find that a sufficiently well-architected microservices system has similar properties and will make Erlang/Elixir less desirable.
> But Erlang/Elixir can probably accomplish many of those properties at a fraction of the cost.
I'd go further as to say that a "sufficiently well-architected cloud architecture" is nearly unaffordable by most teams and thus, without loss of much generality, will not be obtained by you.
And a similar Erlang/Elixir system can just be made by one person.
I think we can do a nice riff on the 'Common Lisp' aphorsim, which is that "Any sufficiently complicated Java,Python,Go or Javascript program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Erlang/OTP."
But Erlang/Elixir can probably accomplish many of those properties at a fraction of the cost.
The core advantages of these languages are (a) a runtime which is highly optimized for running a large set of preemptable concurrent tasks with very minimal shared memory and (b) an ecosystem designed around building fault-tolerant applications out of many independent communicating processes that "supervise" one another to detect failures and gracefully heal them.
There are many details about how those things work, but I'll reiterate: together they offer a system with many robustness properties similar to that of an idealized large microservices architecture but with much less complexity and cost.