Understanding Application Shutdown Behavior in Elixir

The article discusses an incident in a production environment where an Elixir RPC service partially remained functional after a PgBouncer instance went down. Upon investigation, it was found that the service's application was using Mix for starting, which utilized a restart_type of temporary. This behavior allowed the service to keep running even when a key dependency shut down. The author explains the differences between Mix releases and their restart behavior, emphasizing the need to switch to a permanent restart_type to ensure that dependencies correctly trigger service shutdowns and container restarts in Kubernetes. The article ends with relevant links for further reading on Erlang's application management.