🔗 Advanced Strategies to Deploy Phoenix Applications with Kamal

In the first part of our series, we explored how Kamal simplifies Docker-based deployments while providing a cloud-like developer experience. We covered the basics of containerizing Phoenix applications, configuring Kamal, managing secrets, and implementing a CI/CD pipeline for automated deployments.

Now that we've established a solid foundation for deploying Phoenix applications, it's time to dive deeper into more advanced deployment scenarios that leverage both Kamal's flexibility and the Elixir ecosystem's robust distributed capabilities. These strategies will help you scale your Phoenix applications beyond a single instance and build resilient, production-grade systems.

The Erlang VM (BEAM) was designed from the ground up for building fault-tolerant, distributed systems. When combined with Kamal's multi-role deployment capabilities, we can create sophisticated architectures that maximize the strengths of both technologies. Whether you're running background processing with dedicated worker containers, setting up clustered Elixir nodes, or implementing zero-downtime scaling strategies, Kamal provides the infrastructure orchestration layer while Phoenix and the BEAM provide the application resilience.

In this second part, we'll explore how to:

• Configure multi-role deployments to separate web servers from background workers
• Establish Elixir clustering across containers for distributed Phoenix applications
• Implement advanced monitoring solutions for production visibility

By the end of this article, you'll know how to deploy complex Phoenix applications that can scale horizontally while maintaining the operational simplicity that Kamal offers.

Let's begin by extending our basic deployment to handle multiple roles and establish communication between them.