Engineering Insights & Platform Updates

Salesforce has officially stopped selling Heroku Enterprise to new customers. If your team is running production workloads on Heroku, here's what the "End of Sale" announcement actually means and why Gigalixir is the obvious next step.

Gigalixir is formalizing support lifecycles for application stacks. Stacks gigalixir-14 through gigalixir-22 begin sunsetting in June 2026. This post explains each lifecycle phase, the full timeline, and how to check and upgrade your app's stack before retirement.

Gigalixir now offers full support for PostgreSQL 18, a release centered on massive I/O efficiency and modernized developer workflows. This version introduces a new I/O subsystem capable of 3× performance improvements in storage reads, alongside database-friendly features like native uuidv7() support and virtual generated columns. Upgrading is streamlined via the Gigalixir CLI (version 1.13.1+ required), enabling users to reduce maintenance windows and benefit from enhanced OAuth 2.0 security integration while ensuring long-term database support through 2034.

Our CTO, Tim Knight, recently took to the airwaves. Tim joined Mark Ericksen and David Bernheisel on the Thinking Elixir podcast to discuss Gigalixir, working with customer across the development spectrum, and the future of the platform.

Celebrate the highly-anticipated release of Phoenix LiveView 1.0.0, a milestone that cements a new era for real-time web development. This post explores how LiveView enables developers to build rich, interactive user experiences using pure server-side Elixir—eliminating the overhead and complexity of traditional JavaScript frameworks. Discover how this stable release aligns with Gigalixir’s mission for developer productivity and learn how to deploy your next-generation LiveView applications to our Elixir-native cloud with ease.

Gigalixir is excited to announce full support for PostgreSQL 17, a release that brings massive efficiency gains to your data layer. This update features up to a 20x reduction in memory usage for vacuum processes and a 2x increase in write speeds for high-concurrency systems, freeing up vital resources for your applications. Follow our straightforward upgrade guide - requiring Gigalixir CLI 1.13.1 or greater - to leverage these performance boosts and ensure your infrastructure is protected by our long-term support schedule through 2033

As of December 28, 2024, all PostgreSQL versions prior to version 13 have transitioned into extended support. This maintenance guide outlines the critical importance of upgrading to ensure your applications benefit from the latest security patches, performance enhancements, and scaling features. Learn how to use the Gigalixir CLI to verify your current version and follow our step-by-step migration path, including the requirement to bridge through version 13 for older databases—to maintain a secure, high-performance production environment.

Gigalixir has launched a new, comprehensive status page at status.gigalixir.com to provide real-time visibility into the health and performance of the platform. Organized by deployment region, the page offers detailed tracking for North America, Europe, and other global environments, ensuring users can monitor their specific production workloads without clutter. To stay ahead of potential issues, the platform now supports flexible notifications via email, Slack, webhooks, and RSS feeds, allowing developers to integrate mission-critical uptime alerts directly into their existing workflows.

The Gigalixir-18 stack has officially reached its end of life and will no longer receive security or package updates. This critical maintenance guide outlines the version compatibility requirements for migrating to modern stacks (20, 22, and 24), including detailed OTP and Elixir version matrices. Ensure your production applications remain secure by following our step-by-step upgrade process and transitioning away from legacy build types like Distillery.

Gigalixir is proud to announce the official release of the gigalixir-24 stack, built on Ubuntu 24.04 and now serving as the default for all new applications. This guide covers essential upgrade considerations for Mix and Elixir Release apps, including the shift away from Distillery support and new requirements for build mode identification. Learn how to perform a seamless migration using the Gigalixir CLI, clean your build cache for a fresh deployment, and review our long-term support schedule to ensure your infrastructure remains secure through 2029.

Master your local development environment with this step-by-step guide to installing Elixir and Erlang using asdf. Learn why version managers are critical for maintaining project compatibility across Linux, macOS, and Windows, and follow clear instructions for managing plugin dependencies, matching OTP versions, and activating specific toolchains. Whether you are a newcomer or an experienced developer, this guide prepares you to leverage the full power of the Elixir ecosystem before deploying your first Phoenix app to Gigalixir.

Enhance your application’s reliability and performance with Gigalixir’s Dedicated Ingress solution. This guide explains how isolating your incoming traffic with dedicated load balancers and routers ensures consistent performance while providing static IP addresses for easier third-party integration and simplified apex domain registration. Learn about the flexibility of region-wide or per-application configurations and how to start your migration plan with our engineering team today.

Horizontal scaling with multiple replicas is a strategic necessity for maintaining a resilient, high-performance application. This guide explores how replicas provide automated failover, overloading protection, and increased bandwidth while diving into critical engineering considerations like RAM allocation per node and connection limits for external databases. Learn how to manage state across nodes using tools like Libcluster and how to scale your Gigalixir cluster instantly with a single CLI command to ensure a robust, responsive experience for your users.

Boost your application’s performance and reliability by leveraging Read Replicas, now available on Gigalixir’s Standard Tier. This guide explains how to offload resource-intensive analytical and read-heavy queries from your primary database to improve response times and prevent system overloads. Learn how to implement horizontal scaling with a single command using the Gigalixir CLI 1.8.0 or the Console to create a more efficient, responsive user experience without the Enterprise price tag.

We are making production-grade reliability more accessible by bringing High Availability (HA) to our Standard database tier. This guide explores why HA is essential for a seamless user experience,offering automated failover, data replication, and minimized downtime to protect your revenue and reputation. How to enable this 'always-on' protection for your Standard Tier database with a single CLI command to ensure your data remains secure and available, even during unexpected failures.

Effective May 26, 2023, the heroku-buildpack-phoenix-static has been deprecated on Gigalixir due to the failure of a third-party Node.js download dependency. To ensure your Phoenix static assets continue to build reliably, users must migrate to the official gigalixir-buildpack-phoenix-static, which fetches Node directly from source. This guide provides the specific URL update required for your .buildpacks file to maintain a seamless deployment pipeline.

A technical post-mortem detailing the resolution of a certificate propagation issue that affected TLS renewals and issuance for US-Central-1 Google Cloud users in August 2022. Our investigation found that resource starvation in the propagation system delayed certificate updates for a subset of domains. To ensure continued security and uptime, we have implemented automated resource monitors to proactively signal and address scaling needs before they impact your production environments.

TLS1.0 and TLS1.1 will be deprecated on Gigalixir by May, 30th 2022.

A dive into the resolution of 502 errors affecting US-Central-1 Google Cloud users. We identified and fixed a configuration bug where the ingress controller bypassed the Kubernetes service cluster IP in favor of individual Pod IPs, leading to traffic hitting inactive nodes during scaling.

In early 2022, the team behind QuotaGuard stepped in to lead the platform’s next phase of growth, bringing 20+ years of SaaS experience and a commitment to engineer-led, 'no-bot' customer support. Learn about our mission to accelerate feature releases, our continued partnership with founder Jesse, and our dedication to providing a high-performance home for the Elixir and polyglot developer communities

Discover why distributed clustering is one of the most powerful features of the Elixir ecosystem. This post explores five key reasons to embrace clustering, from eliminating expensive dependencies like Redis and external Cron schedulers to improving performance through distributed workloads and in-memory state management, all while keeping your infrastructure simple and cost-effective on Gigalixir

Gigalixir now gives you direct access to your postgres backups and restore from them.

Learn how to leverage native support for Elixir Releases to streamline your Phoenix deployments. This guide walks you through local environment setup using asdf, configuring runtime releases, and deploying to Gigalixir with auto-detection—all while maintaining full access to powerful features like Remote Console and Observer.