libcluster VS ex_aws

Distributed Elixir can be done with Docker containers too, see https://github.com/bitwalker/libcluster which by default has some Kubernetes support but you can also have third party (or custom) clustering strategies. I've not done this myself but I've seen articles about this a lot during the past years.

Hot code updates for most applications aren't really worth it in my opinion, assuming you do something like blue/green rollover deployments. It's cool that it's possible though. But it requires appup files and afaik Distillery is one of the release tools that has support for it built-in.

On the deployment level, you can use synchronous communication using API-based solutions or asynchronous communication using external solutions (RabbitMQ, Kafka,...) or Erlang/Elixir tools (message passing, pg2, PubSub, Libcluster,...)

libcluster – Automatic cluster formation/healing for Elixir applications.

We will use the library ex_aws to manage all the AWS resources

AWS: I don't have a definitive answer for you on AWS. I've used ex_aws a good bit, and it's reasonably solid. aws-elixir also seems to be actively maintained.

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- https://github.com/ex-aws/ex_aws