Adoption and Impact of Elixir at Helvetia Insurance

Helvetia Insurance, a major Swiss insurance provider, integrated Elixir into their systems to replace cumbersome Jenkins pipelines used for governance and configuration of their Kafka streaming platform. The initial success of this integration prompted the company to explore the use of Elixir for additional self-service applications related to their API and supporting services. André Graf addresses questions such as why Elixir was chosen over other technologies and how the organization benefited from this choice. During the talk at ElixirConf EU 2023, he covers the non-technical challenges they faced, such as convincing management and onboarding Java developers to Elixir. He also highlights the quick adaptation and resilience Elixir provided for their infrastructure, which impressed management. Learning from this experience, Graf emphasizes the importance of providing a good introduction to Elixir for new developers and transparently discussing the risks associated with external consultants. Over time, Helvetia shifted from Jenkins and other non-automatable technologies to Elixir and AWS, with the latter playing a crucial role in automating infrastructure provisioning.