Phoenix’s Next Evolution: Chris McCord Unveils the DurableServer

About this episode

Chris McCord discusses the evolution of the Phoenix Framework and durable servers in Elixir.

In this episode of BEAM There, Done That, hosts Francesco Cesarini and Allen Wyma sit down with Chris McCord, the creator of the Phoenix Framework, for a deep dive into the evolving world of Elixir, distributed systems, and durable processes on the BEAM. Fresh from ElixirConf EU, Chris shares the story behind his latest work on durable servers—a powerful abstraction that brings persistence, global process identity, and intelligent placement to familiar GenServer patterns. The conversation explores how these ideas emerged from real-world production challenges, including running geo-distributed applications across multiple regions with no single point of failure. Along the way, the trio unpack the current state of Phoenix and Phoenix LiveView, discuss why most new features are driven by production needs rather than theory, and debate hot topics like WebSockets vs. server-sent events, event-driven architectures vs. long-lived processes, and the true scalability limits of the BEAM. This episode is packed with practical insights for Elixir and Erlang developers building real systems: from supervision tree pitfalls and process design trade-offs to tracing, load balancing, and…

People in this episode

Hosts: Francesco Cesarini, Allen Wyma

Guest: Chris McCord

Topics covered

• Elixir
• Erlang
• distributed systems
• durable objects
• GenServer patterns
• scalability

Keywords

• durable servers
• geo-distributed applications
• WebSockets
• server-sent events
• event-driven architectures
• self-healing systems

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Phoenix Framework, ElixirConf EU, BEAM, Phoenix, Phoenix LiveView

Products: GenServer

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