Adopting Elixir

Finding Processes

When building distributed systems with Elixir, naming and grouping processes is fundamental. A process registry lets you uniquely name a process. A process group lets you group processes based on a property or on a shared attribute.

Process registries and process groups store mutable information. After all, a registry can name a processes, assign it to a group, or destroy that information at any time. However, process data is still ephemeral. Once a process is dead, its name or group don’t matter. If an asteroid strikes your data center, all name and group information will be lost, but all processes will be gone too.

For process registries and process groups, you don’t need to worry about persistence, but you do need to discuss ...